How to install programs on the D: drive, including the AppData directories with full decoupling from C:?

Question

Windows

Hello everyone, it got hot, it hurt, I decided to figure it out.
I must say right away that you do n’t need to offer the choice of drive D when installing programs :)
I’m wondering if there is a working way to install programs on another drive , in order to completely untie them from the system one and keep the programs working adequately .
Firstly, this is saving space on the SSD , and secondly, having installed the programs once, it would be possible to reinstall the system, and then run the programs stored on D on the fly .
Some programs do not want to be installed on other disks at all, and those programs where you can choose the installation path nevertheless store something in C , at least inappdata .
Heard something about editing registry lines to change default folders.
I also know about a way to write an image of the entire configured system to disk, for quick deployment of the system during reinstallation, but this is not quite right. I'm looking more towards NO INSTALL and SymLink (Symbol Links).
Share your experience, mb who has already encountered this topic?
How do you organize the space on your working computer and how you can set up the system just 1 time.
P.S.
After a while, I still managed to find a method for creating fully portable and, moreover, NO INSTALL versions. Huge heavy software can be installed in 1 second, using a pre-prepared cmd file that simply creates Symlink in the right places and adds the necessary entries to the registry. Yes, of course you need to create the reverse of the first file, which will remove these changes if necessary.
As a result, you can install and remove a heavy program 10 times per minute.
+ Does not take up space in C, although the system considers that the program is installed there.
I experimented with Adobe Illustrator CC 2017, it turned out to be very successful :)
It is possible, and even necessary, to create such versions, although the disadvantage is the complexity of creation, justified by the duration of this process (2-3 hours to repack files). In general, it would be great to automate this process of course ...

Answer 1

Migrate programfiles
Migrate user folder

Answer 2

1.Usually, when installing the program, you can specify where to put it.
2. Many programs will not survive OS reinstallation, even if they are installed on a different drive, the program will still need to be reinstalled.
You can find out about the program like this: install it regularly; copy the directory with the program to another location; uninstall the program regularly; try to run the program from the copied location. If the program works, then most likely it will survive the reinstallation of the OS, if not, it will not survive and it is useless to transfer it to another place. By the way, you need to check not only the launch, but also the functionality of the program, it happens that the program starts, but some functionality falls off and an error appears when trying to call functions.
3.Move the user profile to another drive. Right hereI have already described this process. Together with the profile, both the user's AppData and %TEMP% and browser profiles, etc., will be transferred, which eat up a fair amount of disk space.
4.ProgramData - do not touch. This is the "All users" or "Public" profile - there are a lot of symbolic links there, and if you start transferring it, a lot of things can fall off. symbolic links will be corrupted during the transfer. Theoretically, all links can be restored (or transferred with a script), but I have not seen a full-fledged automatic implementation of this process, but by hand - it will take a lot of time.
5.Using some additional tools to clean the registry and remove programs, IMHO, does not make sense. Windows handles this on its own. Also in Win7 and higher there is a fairly powerful cleaning wizard that can do a lot of things.

Answer 3

secondly, having installed the programs once, it would be possible to reinstall the system, and then run programs stored on D on the fly.

No. In general, there is no difference where the program is stored, the main thing is that it is written in the registry, the registry is stored on the system disk.

and those programs where you can choose the installation path nevertheless store something in C, at least in AppData.

Any adequate program should save its data only in the user profile and actually store its settings in AppData, because this is the only place where it should be allowed to write.

I'm looking more towards NO INSTALL and SymLink (Symbol Links).

Symlinks will help solve your problem, but difficulties will still arise.

How do you organize the space on your working computer and how you can set up the system just 1 time.

No changes, everything is normal. After installation, and setting up the system and all programs, backup and system restore is configured.
As a result, you can always roll back the system to any date, or restore after a disk or computer failure.