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[newflavour]

Hey Folks,

Does anyone know if its possible to install MC11 onto a roaming HDD?

Reason I ask is I would love to be able to take 1hdd around with me that contains both the program, library and music. Allowing me to plug it into any machine and not need to "restore" and 'reinstall" any software.

[Matt]

Media Center requires some registry keys (and COM control registrations) to run, so you'll need to install on each new machine.

[jagdriver]

There are freeware/shareware registry montoring utilities on the 'Net you could use, depending upon your comfort/familiarity with the Windows registry.

Note: Though I know this procedure to work, I claim no responsibility for the following. Proceed at your own risk.

Prereq: This technique will work, unmodified, between PCs running Windows 2000 and Windows XP. For earlier Windows versions, the initial "Registry Version n" header in the *.REG (ASCII) file will have to be decremented by one.

With the roaming HDD attached, the trick would be to first install MC on PC 1 as follows, assuming the Windows OS resides on a non-removeable HDD:

1) Run the registry-sniffing tool
2) Install MC to the roaming HDD
3) Stop the registry-sniffing tool.
4) Record the *exact* changes that MC made to the registry.
5) Export these changes from each registry location to a single *.REG file (easier than it sounds).
6) Save the *.REG file to the roaming HDD.

Now, presuming you have registry access to each successive PC, simply connect the roaming HDD, then double-click the *.REG file one time only to cause that version of the Windows OS to recognize that MC is installed.

[newflavour]

ok kewl,

is there an easy way then of taking the following with me from machine to machine:
- playlists (currently I am just exporting them and importing them)
- view schemas

[marko]

it is kewl, I suppose...

a few thoughts that occured to me were...

If a mate of mine brought around a portable hard drive and said to me "I want to plug this into your system, there's just one little .reg file I need to double click on to make it work" my answer would most likely be "no"
You would ask first wouldn't you?

if you were doing this to use MC in public places, work perhaps? in the unlikely event that you were able to import a reg file, you would want to be 200% sure that nothing of personal value to you is caught in that reg file.

then there's liscensing issues to consider...
in fact, the more I think about it, the more scared I become.

Why not try something like:
install MC on each PC you would use it on. put all your music onto your external drive, and keep a library backup there too. make sure that drive is always recognised by the same letter on each machine, aim high up the alphabet, but not too high, mapped drives get named from z-a by default, so to avoid clashing with any of those, think maybe P:\ or O:\

when arriving at the pc, just load the library from the backup on the external drive, and then, god-willing, everything should be hooked up.

would that not do for you?

[modelmaker]

I'm totally with Marko here.

I have laptop in my car as my carputer connected to portable HDs that I take inside and hook up to my HTPC to update, (these drives are also one of my sets of backups), including a fresh backup of mc. I just plug the drives in to the carputer and restore the library from the file on the portable drive. It's simple and quick.