heres what i have: 3 computer running win xp pro (on a network) and
usb + firewire removable hard drive. during an installation of a game
i put the target directory on the usb hard drive and installed the
program files there. what i want to do now is to take the usb hard
drive to another computer and play the game with no dependency on the
first computer. is there some kind of program or method that can do
this? i have seen this done before...

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Request for Question Clarification by poe-ga on 03 Feb 2004 10:43 PST

Hi Space Cowboy,

Unfortunately this is probably not going to be possible. The big
question is which game are you trying to apply your thinking to?

With rare exceptions, and I mean seriously rare, no software
application only installs files to its own directory. You can happily
designate a directory on your removable hard drive and the software
will happily install to it, but unfortunately that's not all it will
do.

It is very likely to need to add system files to the partition that
Windows XP is installed to (usually c:). Usually these are .dll files
(direct link libraries) that need to be in somewhere like c:\winnt or
c:\winnt\system32. Also most software adds registry entries to the
system registry, which is kept on the same partition.

While there are exceptions to this rule (Teleport Pro springs to
mind), they are few and far between. The only games I would think are
likely to work this way are old DOS games. I would suggest that the
newer the game, the less likely you're going to be able to do what you
want.

Technically you could possibly install Windows XP itself to a
removable hard drive and thus get round the problem, but it's not
going to be a particularly viable solution. I ran Windows NT from an
external Jaz drive once for a while though I never tried moving it to
a different PC. Following this route would give you problems with
Windows XP Activation too, as XP doesn't like hardware to change much.

The other option you have is to copy the installation files for the
game to your removable hard drive, and then install to whichever PC
you move to. While this would certainly work, it would probably be far
easier to just carry the original CD around with you.

Sorry the news isn't better for you, but please let me know which game
you're wanting to make portable in this way and the news may improve.

Poe

You can't... if you think, lot of windows software installs some dlls
in the windows directory (exactly in %WINDIR%/system or
%WINDOWS%/system32 directories) so if you install a game (or something
else) in one computer, you need the dlls that the game have installed
in the computer that you have instaleed it.