Uninstalling software from secondary hard drive?

[sqthreer]

Is there an easy way to do this from my main drive?

To explain my issue better, I mean that I have two hard drives. The one that I now use as a secondary one and primarily for storage of media, I used to use as my primary, and have Windows and lots of other software installed. I then got a new hard drive and made the other as secondary, but never formatted it or uninstalled anything (the circumstances at the time didn't allow me to) so it's basically in the same state as it was from when I used to use it regularly. What I mean to do is just clear out a little junk since I'm not using any of those programs.

Would I have to temporarily make it my primary and then manually go through and uninstall everything? I hope not :|

I'd also like to say that if there's a way around this without formatting it (which I'm actually not totally sure how to do) just because I don't have any place to keep the important files I want to save until it's all done.

Hopefully this makes sense enough, thanks.

[patio]

Not nearly clear enough...are you saying you have an OS installed on each HDD?

If so this complicates what you are trying to do...

[sqthreer]

Yes I do have an OS on both hard drives >_>

Windows XP Pro with SP2 on both.

In what way does this complicate things?

[GX1_Man]

Which drive has your active version of Windows? Do you have the option to boot into the old one when the computer starts?

If it is absolutely not active, you can just delete the Windows and Program Files folders and get that space back until you are ready for a more permanent solution.

[sqthreer]

Well my primary has the active version of Windows. It's the one I use. The other one has Windows but I never boot into it and have no reason to. I also don't have the option to unless I take out my main hard drive; it doesn't give me an option to boot into it on start-up.

So I can just delete those folders then, yes? I would really like to format it eventually, but I'll need an external hard drive or something to temporarily put all the stuff on.

[patio]

Why not grab a DVD burner instead ? ? ?

[sqthreer]

I do have a DVD burner, but I have almost 100 gigs of info I want to keep, and I'm not willing to use up 20-something DVDs for that :[

[GX1_Man]

If that hard drive craters tomorrow, that data will be gone forever. You don't sound like you have anything worth investing in, so maybe it's not important. All hard drives die eventually, and that's a fact.

[patio]

If using dual-layer media the storage capacity goes up to almost 9G per DVD...

patio.  8-)

[sqthreer]

If that hard drive craters tomorrow, that data will be gone forever. You don't sound like you have anything worth investing in, so maybe it's not important. All hard drives die eventually, and that's a fact.

A good point indeed. Everything I have on the hard drive is stuff I could get again, it would just take a *censored* of a lot of time and patience, so you're right, it's not worth investing in. I am going to go through it all though and clean up some stuff I know I won't want in the future. I'm kind of a computer pack rat and rarely delete anything, but I guess this is a good enough time to get over that :]

If using dual-layer media the storage capacity goes up to almost 9G per DVD...

Could you expand on that please?

[patio]

Dual-layer burners with the correct media expand the storage area per disk from 4.2G to 8.4....

[linuxlover]

I believe a dual-layer disk is much more costly. Even more than 2 single layered ones.

[patio]

Not any longer.