The continued saga of the cannibalized hard drives

After doing some research, and more importantly after realizing that I still have no idea where my WinXP disc is, I have decided not to mess with the Raid set-up on the two hard drives I snatched from a formerly working computer. Instead, I am now working on turning this into some form of working setup without having to reinstall any part of the OS. Re-discovering what was installed on a computer that hasn't been powered on in almost a year, and that received no serious attention in about a year before then, was quite an adventure.

What I have done this far is:

1. Removing the eTRust security suite and replacing it with Comodo Firewall, AVG antivirus, SpywareGuard and SpywareBlaster. Spybot was installed for scanning purposes, and will be kept for the same reason.

2. Created a new user account for myself, and deleted the others.

3. Went through parts of the Read & Run sticky before realizing that i might as well wait until I know what I'm keeping and which partitions I'm formatting before I spend another weekend on scan after scan after scan...

Here's what I want to do:

1. Use the 160GB partition C:\ for Windows XP (already installed there) all applications, games, and other such things.

2. Use the 80GB partition for storage only. Everything that ordinarily would go in My Documents would then go here, from music to photos to writing, to everything else similar to that.

For that, I will need to move all applications that are now installed in Program Files on E:\ to the Program Files folder on C:\. Yes, they both have one. They both have some stuff installed, but the vast majority of everything seems to have been installed and stored on E:\, leading to the smaller partition being filled by about 80%, and the larger being filled by about 50%. I'm not sure what is taking up so much of C:\ since nothing of importance seems to have been installed there. Aside from the operating system, that is.

I'm a bit lost on how to make the above happen. All the disc cloning applications I have found are geared towards making a identical and bootable copy of whichever drive you want to make a copy of, not for merely sliding an installation from one to another. There are a few things installed that would take me far too long to reconfigure, but that I really would like to keep.

The inner workings of Windows XP remain enough of a mystery to me that I really need some help here. How do I move the Program Files folder from E:\ to C:\, and keep all installations fully functional?

Anyone?

 

bump....?

 

The problem of moving the program files folder is that when programs are installed, registry entries are written pointing to the dll's etc as being in E and not C along with internal program settings I believe. I also have two program folders by intent on different partitions so that if my XP blows up, the apps that were installed with all their settings will still be there if I have to clean install XP. I always point to a different partition than C if possible. I'd say leave it where it is. It would be interesting to hear other comments if this is indeed possible. I hope I made sense.

EDIT: BTW, MS products don't give a choice of where to install, they automatically go to C AFAIK