Are there any issues about installing Sonar but not on my main C drive?


I have two other SSD drives in my PC  that I could use both 500GB.
 
I did this some time ago now and seemed to remember getting a message. Bad things can happen?
 
My C drive is not full but it is only 128GB
 
Any help would be appreciated.
 
Jorel

When you run the installer, look EVERYWHERE for drive letters and change them to what you want.  It works fine where ever it's installed.
 
However, there are still parts that get installed to C: by default, you can defeat this by using redirecting.  The installer thinks it's reading/writing to a folder on C: but it's actually going where you've redirected.
 
Unfortunately I'm not techie enough to tell you how to set that up...  I just know it can be done.

Here are some helpful links for using MLink to redirect:
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/m/tm.aspx?m=3049397&p=2
http://forum.cakewalk.com/m/tm.aspx?m=3138315&p=1
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Producer-upgrade-and-multisample-folder-problems-m3086804.aspx
 
I did mine the old-fashioned way, and altered pointers within programs and/or the Registry, and physically moved data, but the above methods work well, and scook has been successfully guiding folks through using mlink for a very long time.
 
Best of luck, 
 
Bob Bone
 
 

No problem. I ran SONAR on D: for years. If using Command Center to install, you will need to enable Verbose installation in Settings to get the legacy SONAR installer dialog so you can change the install path. Otherwise Command Center will default to C:. And you have to do that for every update; it won't automatically use the existing path.

robert_e_bone
I did mine the old-fashioned way, and altered pointers within programs and/or the Registry, and physically moved data, ...

So have I but it requires constant vigilance and maintenance when updating or installing new components.  I'd decided to finally go the symbolic link route for my VST3 and Cakewalk user folders (a lot of stuff had already been moved by 'normal' methods) but have kept putting it off.  Thanks for the links and the reminder.  I just moved those two folders to my "Cakewalk and vst" partition on my ssd (which is unfortunately getting pretty tight with less than a gb free).
 
Sonar is blissfully ignorant of the changes made behind its back.
 

IMO it's not worth the trouble.
 
SONAR and third-party plugins don't take up that much space, and disk performance isn't an issue, so the benefits are small. It's just samples that take up a lot of storage and I/O bandwidth, so there are plenty of reasons to site them elsewhere.
 
The issue isn't so much with SONAR itself, but rather installers for third-party utilities and plugins. They nearly always default to C:, and some make it unnecessarily difficult to switch to another drive. It's so much easier and less error-prone to simply accept their default pathnames every time.
 
Yes, you can use redirection as a kludge. But it really is a kludge, because regardless of what type of redirection you employ there is always the possibility of losing your mapping. Even when Microsoft itself does it, problems eventually ensue. 

This is a fight I decided to give up on.  Bought a new disk for the C drive, big enough for all the damn third-party stuff CW insists on offering as BONUS***ADD**ONS***!!!! that are not well made software.    As bitflipper says, it ends up not that big, so maybe fifty extra GB can handle it all.    

Paul P

robert_e_bone
I did mine the old-fashioned way, and altered pointers within programs and/or the Registry, and physically moved data, ...

So have I but it requires constant vigilance and maintenance when updating or installing new components.  I'd decided to finally go the symbolic link route for my VST3 and Cakewalk user folders (a lot of stuff had already been moved by 'normal' methods) but have kept putting it off.  Thanks for the links and the reminder.  I just moved those two folders to my "Cakewalk and vst" partition on my ssd (which is unfortunately getting pretty tight with less than a gb free).
 
Sonar is blissfully ignorant of the changes made behind its back.
 

I am sure that the maintenance/vigilance requirements vary from person to person.  For ME, I only generally am adding sample sounds, as with my analog synths I can build whatever I please, not to mention I have gigantic swaths of tens of thousands of non-sampled presets already on my system.
 
So, for me it is easy to get installed sample library additions to go to the correct drive and path, and although I DO check once in a while on the health and well being of my primary drive (SSD), that's about it.
 
Bob Bone
 

bitflipper
Yes, you can use redirection as a kludge. But it really is a kludge, because regardless of what type of redirection you employ there is always the possibility of losing your mapping. Even when Microsoft itself does it, problems eventually ensue. 

Well I hope not since I'm on a french version of win7 and the translation of all system folders (the important user-visible ones) are translated by inserting a junction with the french name linking to the folder with the english name.  That on top of the junctions Windows already uses in english.  It's one reason I've been a bit hesitant go this route since it makes the chains of symbolic links I already go through that much longer.

I wouldn't worry too much, Paul. For you the worst-case scenario is your folder names start reverting to English, but most programs will continue to work. Windows always knows the path to system32 regardless of how it's displayed.
 
(BTW, I do know how annoying that is to French Canadians. I have many customers in Quebec, who get quite incensed when a message pops up in English. I am sympathetic, because some of them have as much trouble with English as I do with French.)