I recently installed a new hard drive and OS. I have all of my program software on a seperate physical drive. When I went to the new destop and tried to copy shortcuts for the programs to start I get an error message or the program won't start. nuffsaid6591

They need to be reinstalled for Windows registry to recognize them. i_XpUser

XpUser is right. The only shortcut on the desktop isn't enough to launch the application. Hope, you backed up the original programs' distribs but not the 'program files' folder or desktop shortcuts.. If you have all distribs of your programs, you need to run them and install these programs over the clean system. If you don't want to repeat these operations every time you reinstall the OS, you'd better use any data backup and imaging software like True Image or Ghost. Personally I prefer True Image. This kind of software will help you easily restore your data and operating sistem if the OS accidentally crashes. The most simple way is to image the system partition after the OS and programs clean installation and save it on another HDD or CD/DVD. If your system or HDD crashes you will be able to recover the OS with all installed programs and settings to the current state.