How to back up my hard drive then delete OS

[Mustafa_10]

Hi, i have 2 Os's installed. 1 is installed on my 3TB HDD and the other is installed on my 250GB ssd. I was wondering how i could back up ONLY my files from my hdd onto and external hard drive without backing up windows, as i would like to remove it from my HDD entirely.

 

[jsmithepa]

This will require that you know where your data (non-OS stuff) are located. I wish there was something more automatic.

 

[Mustafa_10]

This will require that you know where your data (non-OS stuff) are located. I wish there was something more automatic.

In my C: drive i have 2 folders named "Windows" and "Windows.old". are these these only folders related to windows or are there more?

 

[jsmithepa]

I think it's safe to delete Windows* and Program Files* Don't forget hidden pagefile.sys and hibernate.sys.

Applications like to store stuff in Document and Settings.

 

[Mustafa_10]

For anyone wondering, I ended buying an external hard drive and i made a backup of my steam games on it. once i finished i formatted my drive so that it was empty and just used it as storage. i downloaded steam to my hdd and just used my backed up files to recover my games. i think this is the only way you can fully delete an OS.