hard Drive questions please help

i just buyed a SSD today and im going to make that as a Main

so my question is my Hard Drive with all the windows Files can i make that into a D: Drive With out Reformating???

Comments

  • BlackHawkBlackHawk Bible music connoisseur There's no place like 127.0.0.1 Icrontian

    You can change the drive letter in Disk Management. If it's been a while since you've reinstalled I assume lots, if not all programs are going to be looking for the files on the old drive letter.

    What I'd do is simply clone the old drive to the new SSD and format the hard drive and give it the next letter available, which I assume is D. Be sure to enable/disable all the relevant stuff in WIndows if you're changing from a regular spinning disk drive to a newer solid state disk. Some people simply recommend starting fresh if you're moving to a new SSD.

    CB
  • TushonTushon I'm scared, Coach Alexandria, VA Icrontian

    I usually like to take a new drive as a fresh install time (especially if you're transitioning from HDD -> SSD), but you may want to clone as @BlackHawk indicated. If you do that, there won't be anything special you need to do for the old disk regarding disk letters, programs, etc. Steam can be told about the old install locations if you want to leave them on the old drive though, to avoid complete reinstall (as an example).

  • Like @Tushon - I see the SSD as a perfect opportunity to clean install Windows. A clone of the old drive may be effective, but without seeing the install I can't tell how messy it is. Installing clean, going through the trouble of figuring out what is going to live on your SSD vs. your platter drive, while it will be more work can be very rewarding once it is set up properly. How much data did you have on your hard drive? How large of an SSD did you purchase?

  • tarrbottarrbot Detroit Burbs

    I know I'm late to this but for future reference, I do this pretty much on a weekly basis upgrading hardware for my users... replacing HDDs with SSDs.

    The fix is two fold... essentially you will backup the old drive and restore it to the new drive.

    You need to be running a newer version of Windows (7, 8 or 10) and using Veeam Endpoint Backup https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html

    The second thing is you need space to perform a backup... so either an external drive, a network share or a USB stick that's large enough to hold the backup. There is a corporate alternative, which I use, which includes Veeam Backup on a server share.

    Essentially, install the Veeam Endpoint software onto the PC. Make your backup and before replacing the drive, format (another) USB stick to boot Veeam recovery from.

    Shut the PC/laptop down. Replace the drive. Boot from the USB stick you created with Veeam Endpoint and go.

    One caveat I seem to have. When booting up into the Veeam environment, you will get an option for Baremetal recovery and some other options. One of those options is Tools. Go there and disable "inject drivers into OS" or something similar. Heck, they may have fixed this on newer versions. I'm using an older 1.x.x version of it.

    Restore your backup onto the new SSD and you're pretty much good to go.

    If you use Outlook, it will rebuild itself for some reason as if you've never installed it. You /may/ have some licensing issues with some oddball software (like AutoCAD and other Autodesk products) but you should see a huge difference in that regard.

  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian

    Umm, with a 1TB or bigger SSD, couldn't it be partitioned so that there are two partitions, one for backing up to and the other for restoring to from the first?

  • tarrbottarrbot Detroit Burbs

    Yes, you could do that...

    ... but I wouldn't call it a backup... maybe a copy. But the reason for a backup is for data protection. If you're concerned about the data, you want a secondary, non-system-related backup.

    This would insure you don't have hardware failure taking out your data and if the hardware fails on a 2-partition drive it won't matter that one was the original and one was the copy.

    You could segregate the data by doing this if you wanted it to be different for some reason...

    ... an example would be using multiple OSes on the same drive or even same system with different physical drives. Back in the day, OSes didn't interoperate well together. Some would read one system format (Fat16 as an example) and some wouldn't. NTFS seemed to be a notorious problem at one point for reading data from it using anything other than Windows NT/2000/XP.

    If you're critical about data integrity (like I am), you'd have three or more backups. Or some other setup for backup like a NAS with redundant hot spare drives in it. But those are overkill for home use, IMO.

  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian

    A pure copy functions as a backup-- I was thinking about using one physical drive of SSD kind and splitting it in half partition wise, then doing most of the work on the SSD, is faster than an HDD of non SSD kind.

    If the backup were done to include the boot info partition, then I would copy that first in Linux.

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