I just got an external hard drive for my graphics (mainly Poser) and would like to know if I can put the runtime files on the new drive and leave the Poser4 exe. on the old drive...will it work?

Sort of. Some models need to be in the Poser/runtime folder and won't work on an outside runtime. (Mike3, Vicky3 spring to mind) When you say external... you mean via USB or Firewire? If yes, you might find that access is slower than from your internal drive. I have a QDisk here, but I don't dare stick my runtime on there... It would slow it down dramatically, even with USB2. Silke

Yes, it's a USB. So does this mean that I would need to install Poser again on the new hard drive...along with all the various models, etc.? I couldn't just install Poser on the one and then move the old runtime files to the new drive? Gee, I hate this kind of stuff. :-)

Why not just copy your entire Poser installation over to your new hard drive? I've done that at least once. Of course it might be nice if you had Norton Systemworks to fix any broken shortcuts?!

I have a 250gb Maxtor external hard drive which uses USB 2.0 (and firewire). I copied the complete curious labs, poser 4, runtime folder onto it and then made a shortcut to the poser4.exe file and put it on my desktop. I did run Correct Reference, available in freestuff, and it seems to work fine. I use this for "experimentation" and keep poser on my C: drive for Sunday Best.

Good info, I have often thought about doing something like this. Bobbie_Boucher could you expand your comments on 'broken shortcuts'? I am not sure what that might be and would like to be forewarned of any problems that might occur. Thanks.

You might not have any broken shortcuts at all if you copy your entire Poser installation over to the new hard drive. Basically you probably know a shortcut is something that refers back to something else. For instance, you can have shortcuts to icons that run programs on your desktop. I wonder if maybe some items have "absolute texture references," such as C:program filesPoser?! If you move your Poser installation to a different drive, then those references would not work. CorrectReference might fix any such problems.

Thanks Bobbie...yep I know all about shortcuts and how they can sometimes be problems. I just didn't think of them in reference to all the ones in Poser...but it can full of them isn't it? I have d/ld CorrectReference at this point...I have read a lot of good reports on it. Thanks again.

So it sounds like I can just drag and drop the entire Poser folder to the new hard drive? Guess I'll try it and see what happens. :-)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1545516

make sure you have a usb2.0 hub in your machine or it'll be almost as slow as a floppy drive (painfully slow)