Adding new hard drive as primary boot, transfer files from current boot drive.

[Seigler]

Hello,

I've seen a couple of threads that somewhat talk about changing out hard drives, replacing hard drives, or pulling cloning entire hard drives, however my question doesn't seem to fit into those, at least not from what I can tell.

I'm getting a new NVMe to replace an old HDD that I bought kind of as a place holder until now. My old HDD is currently set as my boot drive and has quite a few pictures on, videos, and documents on it that I would like (and rather unorganized I might add). I was wondering if I would leave my current HDD plugged in as it is and simply add my NVMe, set it up in the BIOS and boot from my NVMe where I then install my new Windows OS if I can then somehow go through and select certain files to transfer between my old HDD which would still be installed as a boot drive to my new NVMe boot drive? Almost like dragging/dropping a file from one folder to another but instead from my old HDD boot to my new NVMe? I'm not sure if maybe it might be something like the advanced sharing option or what but I just thought I'd give it a shot and see if anyone had any suggestions.

tl;dr adding new NVMe as boot, was hoping to leave current boot HDD in and somehow transfer select files from old HDD boot to new NVMe boot.

Thank you.

 

[ArtPog]

Your objective is quite doable, at least to a certain point.

Following the installation of your M.2 NVMe SSD and fresh-installing the OS (Win 10?) onto that drive, and ensuring that the system boots to the new SSD without incident and functions problem-free...

You can then install the "old" HDD as a secondary drive in the system. Obviously you'll then be able to copy/move files from the HDD to the SSD, e.g., your general documents, audio-visual files, and the like.

Programs that have been installed on the HDD are a different matter. In virtually every case (there may be a rare exception or two) you will have to reinstall the program from your new SSD boot drive. Now in most cases you will be able to reinstall the program onto your secondary HDD (we'll assume it's now the D: drive) although it's possible (but generally unlikely) that a specific program may insist that it's installed on the C: drive.

Now there is another option...

You could set up a dual-boot system and thus be able to utilize the HDD in more or less the same fashion as when it was connected as the sole drive in the system. This, of course, would require that each time you power-up the PC you select the drive/system to boot to.

I would think long & hard before taking this latter approach. For one thing you would be sacrificing a significant amount of operational speed utilizing your HDD rather than the SSD. And while you never indicated the OSs involved, I'm assuming the HDD contains the Win 10 OS as will the SSD.

I'm not at all clear on why you would even be entertaining this possible notion. If the HDD contained a different OS from the SSD and there was some special reason(s) why you desired or needed this dual-boot approach involving two different OSs, that would be a consideration.

As a general proposition, it seems to me that a sensible approach would be to treat the HDD as a secondary drive to be used for backup/storage purposes. To that end eventually delete the OS from that drive so as to gain a considerable amount of disk-space capacity.

 

[hang-the-9]

If you are just adding a new drive, it may come with a cloning program that will allow you to transfer the full drive to the second one. Or you can use a 3rd party tool like Macrium Reflect (there is a free version) or Clonezilla (open source, bit harder to use). You should have run across cloning drives in your research already.

On a side note, NVMe is just a memory controller type, it's not a drive type. "NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCI) is a logical device interface specification for accessing non-volatile storage media attached via a PCI Express (PCIe) bus."

It's basically something like the driveshaft of a car, not an actual car brand or engine. It's just what is used to talk to the actual storage media, not the type of drive.