Thinkpads Forum

I'm getting an Ultrabay HDD adapter for my T500, and I'm putting an SSD in the main slot and moving my current hard drive to the adapter. If I do a clean install of Windows on the SSD, will I be able to get programs off the hard drive in the Ultrabay adapter and run them without reinstalling them? Also, will I need to uninstall Windows from the hard drive in the Ultrabay adapter?

You will need to reinstall your applications to your boot drive (C:). They will not run from your original drive as is once it is no longer the boot drive. Although a clean install on the SSD is best, if you want to avoid reinstalling your applications, you can clone the original drive to the new one with something like Acronis. There are many threads describing this on thinkpads.com. However, I think most recommend a clean install when putting in an SSD.

So I can't run applications off the storage drive? I was wanting to get a 64GB SSD for price reasons, and just put the OS and major programs like Photoshop on it, but keep smaller programs like Office, Skype, Chrome, and my games on the storage drive.

I just read online somewhere else that you can put a Program Files 2 folder in the second drive and run apps from that.

Would it be possible to set the SSD as the secondary drive and still boot from it by setting it as my boot device through the BIOS, making it so I could install programs to my bigger hard drive?

HIMAN1998 wrote:I just read online somewhere else that you can put a Program Files 2 folder in the second drive and run apps from that.

You can certainly install programs to a second drive, e.g. D drive in the ultrabay. However, they need to reinstalled for them to run. You cannot just move the drive, rename folders and expect them to run.

mpcook wrote:

HIMAN1998 wrote:I just read online somewhere else that you can put a Program Files 2 folder in the second drive and run apps from that.

You can certainly install programs to a second drive, e.g. D drive in the ultrabay. However, they need to reinstalled for them to run. You cannot just move the drive, rename folders and expect them to run.

OK, I was thinking that I couldn't install programs at all on the ultrabay drive. I can reinstall them easily. And I'm assuming I can move my standard download folder to the ultrabay drive when I download something after I do the whole thing, Chrome gives you that option.

Pretty much any folders can be put on your D drive (except some of the OS folders) so you should be able to run fine with 64GB as your boot drive. You can put "my documents" and etc. on your D drive as well. I can't say that all software will be happy with that, but most will, or give you an option to set the folder where files are loaded from or saved to.

So should I put my main programs on the SSD (Photoshop, Office, Antivirus, etc.)?