moving "program files" to another physical hard disk?

Yes you can. I just did this recently when I swapped my SATA drive for an SSD drive on my laptop.

If you are using Windows 7, the Backup & Restore feature allows you to make a full image of your hard drive.

You can use this feature to create an image of your C drive and save it to an external backup drive, then remove it from your computer, put the new disk, restore the image and the best part is that if this doesn't work all you have to do is put your all C drive and start all over again.

The difficult part is doing the restore because you have to do it from your Windows 7 installation disk or from a Windows System Repair Disk (I highly recommend this option because it takes less time as it doesn't have to unzip all the Windows installation files).

** note: depending on the interface of your external drive that has the backup of your C drive, you may have to use the actual Windows 7 installation disk so that it loads the drivers for that interface ***

You can create a repair disc within Windows 7.

1. With your new hard disk in place, boot the computer using the System Repair Disc.
When booting up, choose whatever option is available through your BIOS options to force your computer to boot from the disc
2. Select language preferences, time, keyboard, etc.
This is all standard stuff. Just select it and move on.
3. From the options presented select "Repair your Computer"
4. Click NEXT in System Recovery Options
You will be presented with a screen that will ask you to select which copy of windows to repair, but since you removed the original Disk "C", you most likely won't see anything. So just press NEXT to see the actual options.
5. Select "System Image Recovery"
And just follow the instructions.

Good luck!

Thanks Alejandro, but I only want to move Program files from c: to e: and leave the rest on c:

We have servers that are built here at my work. OS is always on C and non OS programs and data is on E. They haven't moved "C's program files", they simply have an alternate location to install.

If I were you I would first create a "Program Files" directory on the root of your second drive. Then I would de-install things from C and re-install them on the second drive. Then going forward, simply override the install for your apps and explicitly put them on the second drive.

Most programs use the registry. The registry entries are often pointing back to where you originally installed. That is why you simply can't move it (for the most part).

CR