How to add an SSD to a system that has been running for awhile...

[Flackseeed]

So over christmas i bought a 120gb sandisk ssd, and i would like to use it as a boot drive for my system, i am currently using a 1tb 7200rpm hdd for everything. I tryed reinstalling windows onto the ssd, but for some reason the installer wasnt excepting my windows key, (legit copy of windows), i was gifted the copy of windows, so it may have been the OEM version, but anyways i was wanting to know how i could move windows from my hard drive and onto my ssd, without deleting everything other than windows on my hard drive, i dont have a place to put the files temporarily, so can i just copy a bunch of windows files?
i may be totally misunderstanding how all this works, but can i somehow only transfer windows instead of everything, which will not fit... i have about 600 gb used on my drive...

 

[elmo2006]

So over christmas i bought a 120gb sandisk ssd, and i would like to use it as a boot drive for my system, i am currently using a 1tb 7200rpm hdd for everything. I tryed reinstalling windows onto the ssd, but for some reason the installer wasnt excepting my windows key, (legit copy of windows), i was gifted the copy of windows, so it may have been the OEM version, but anyways i was wanting to know how i could move windows from my hard drive and onto my ssd, without deleting everything other than windows on my hard drive, i dont have a place to put the files temporarily, so can i just copy a bunch of windows files?
i may be totally misunderstanding how all this works, but can i somehow only transfer windows instead of everything, which will not fit... i have about 600 gb used on my drive...

Your easiest solution is to image or transfer the contents of the TB drive to the SSD using utilities such as Macrium Reflect however you will not be able to pick and choose what gets transferred over. Your best option is to perform the following after installing Macrium:

1. Clean up your temp folders/files i.e. CCleaner.
2. Uninstall thos apps/programs that you no longer require
3. Disable your pagefile and hibernate files = you may be looking at roughly 8GB's of swap files
4. Defrag your drive
5. Remove unwanted Windows apps that may have been installed during the installation of Windows.
6. Perform a registry cleanup using CCleaner
7. Shutdown and Restart
8. Run CCleaner one last time
9. Run Macrium Reflect

Once the OS has been installed on the SSD, you can then use your TB drive for data content purposes.

Hope this helps.