Move programs from old hard drive to new hard drive on different computer

[mondragueitor]

Hey guys, I’ve run into a little bit of an issue when building a second computer, and I thought it’d be a great opportunity to post here for the first time.

I have been building computers for me and my family for about 4 years.
3 years ago, I built a budget gaming pc for my brother. Long story short, he used the heck out of it and fried the motherboard, CPU, and graphics card. His old hard drive has windows and all of his games on it, and it’s failing.
Basically, we’re pretty much building an entirely new system.

So we bought an SSD for Windows and a HDD for his games and all that. I will be installing a fresh copy of Windows on the SSD, and I’d like to have all of his games and programs from his old hard drive installed on the new one.

What would be the most efficient way to carry over the programs and get them installed on the new build and keep all of the progress/data saved.
Cloning the original drive isn’t an option since an SSD while be used solely for Windows. I understand for most games you can just get your progress back from Steam, but he has a lot of non-steam games.

Sorry if I sound like a complete noob, I haven’t gotten my hands in a computer for a while now.

 

[doolittle]

Unfortunately the way windows works with the registry this is no easy task and while there are commercial solutions like PCmover, PCrelocator, PCtrans (worst name ever) and Zinstall winwin (only ones I am aware of, I am sure there are more) - none of them work 100% reliably.

Only way would be to do the fresh install of the OS and programs you want on the SSD, then copy the files over (data files only, not programs). With games it's a bit easier for success since all you need is the savegame files, which unfortunately can be in various locations so it's just a matter of finding them. For some apps (like firefox or chrome) you can restore their entire profile dir and that usually works nicely once you remove the other "default" profile that's setup once you install the app.