Sonar is installed on my C: drive which now reports it has almost run out of space. I have freed up as much space as I can but it is still very low. What options do I have in moving the whole shebang onto another hard drive?
I assume uninstallation will be required followed by a complete re-installation but I am hoping there is a less painful alternative.
 
Any advice would be gratefully received.
 

Here is something that may work without you having to re-install.
Take all data files ( i.e music files VST's ect.) and move them to your secondary drive with sonar you will have to go to pref and tell sonar where the files are.
Do this with all your programs i.e. office, games, ect. if you have music, video, or movies move them as well. In fact you can move the My Documents to the secondary location.  That may give your C drive the much needed space it needs. Leave the exe programs on the C drive and take the only data files to the secondary drive take your time and check the other programs to see if they need to be shown where files have been move to.

Hey Red4Con1. Thank you for the advice. That may well be worth a shot. 

Another option, is to make an image file of your entire C-drive onto your other internal drive (i.e. D-drive) or to an external hard drive.  With Windows 7 you could use Norton Ghost v.15.  With Windows 10 use a program I have seen others on here praise called Macrium Reflect.

Now, once your C-drive has been imaged by that program, you then change out your existing C-drive and replace it with a new and larger capacity drive.  By all means, use an SSD drive, even if your existing drive is a spinning hard drive.  Buy an SSD that it is at least twice the capacity of your current drive.
 
Then, run the RESTORE program of which ever imaging program you used (i.e. Ghost, Macrium) and restore that image file from your secondary or external drive back to the new, blank C-drive you bought, and you will be in great shape.

Lastly, if your system has room for expansion (physical space as well as another SATA connection to connect the drive to), you have the option of adding the "old" C-drive to your system as another storage drive.  Format it once it is added, and you'll have it for more storage space.

What I do is hover the mouse over folders and look for where the large files are.
Start at the root of all folders and work your way in. 
I have a 128 SSD on my main DAW and buy moving just the sample libraries and CCC downloads  got it down to 60%. The old CCC download folder was a 20 GB hog
For sure move all picture and music document files elsewhere. 
What you can do is just install all your software to the C drive, software doesn't use that much space. 
But all your DATA files should be elsewhere. 
, 
 

Another option... If you already have another drive, TreeSize Free will be able to show you the hogs on your C drive. For many items, you can make directory junctions after moving those to the other drive.

If you have quite a few Sonar projects then the easiest option to create more space would be to just move your Sonar projects folder on to a new drive. Then in the Sonar settings point the project folder setting to its new location. As most of the larger files used by Sonar are your WAV file recordings this would i guess take up more space than the executables (which are pretty small) and free up that much needed room. I always keep my projects folder seperate from my Windows drive. It can also help to reduce disk performance issues as writing large WAV files and also accessing the swap file on the same disk can cause quite an overhead if your disks are blindingly fast.

Not sure if this will work, but you could try just moving the Cakewalk directory from C:\Program Files to another drive, e.g. D:\Cakewalk then create a hardlink (junction) from an elevated command prompt e.g.:
 
mklink /J "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk" D:\Cakewalk
 
After doing this, the C:\Program Files\Cakewalk directory will re-appear... but it's actually stored on your D: drive within the D:\Cakewalk directory.
 
If you're considering compressing your drive and/or folders, one thing to watch out for... the prochannel modules / style dials cannot be compressed. If you do, they'll disappear - just uncompressing these files will solve it tho.
 
You may find similar issues using mklink - I'm not sure, but probably worth a go. You can always copy D:\Cakewalk back to C:\Program Files\Cakewalk in any case which will remove the link.
 
[EDIT] - it's probably safer, and makes more sense to do this with the C:\Cakewalk Content directory (as it's larger), so:
(i) move "c:\cakewalk content" to "d:\cakewalk content"
(i) mklink /J "C:\Cakewalk Content" "D:\Cakewalk Content"
 
M.
 

Thank you all for the excellent advice. A daunting task, anyway I look at it. But I will give a few of these suggestions a try and hope I don't stuff it up completely.