installing windows to new hard drive

[drinkingcola86]

I'm looking at getting a solid state drive for my computer to run as my main hard drive for windows.

I currently have a 240g mechanical drive for my main, a 320g for recording and a 2tb for games and modeling items.

My question comes to this, I currently run windows 10 through the free upgrade. I know i need to download the iso for that in order to install it to the other hard drive.

What I'm wondering though is this, do i need to uninstall the windows files on the old drive before installing it to the new drive? Or can I leave windows installed on that drive and just run it from the new drive and set it to look at that from the bios?

 

[shloader]

If you like how your install is running as it is now, you could just clone it to a SSD permitted the SSD is equal or larger than the hard drive. Of course, throw that all out if the idea of a clean install appeals to you. In that case all you'd need to is install the SSD in place of the hard drive and begin the install process as usual. You don't need to do anything with the hard drive aside from wipe it once you have everything relevant taken off the drive. Also make sure the SATA channel you're connecting this to is in AHCI mode, not some legacy mode.

 

[cosmoji]

well you can change your boot drive from the bios. however, if you do a clean install to the new ssd, none of your stuff installed on your current drive will be installed on it. i would suggest cloning your current drive to the new ssd, rather than freshly installing windows on it and starting from scratch.

 

[drinkingcola86]

So I picked up the samsung 850 evo 250gig ssd. It should be here this week and I've never cloned a drive before. Is there anything I should know before doing this? Software suggestions?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147372&cm_re=samsung_850_evo_250gb-_-20-147-372-_-Product

 

[cosmoji]

the newegg page says it comes with a program for use in that. just follow its instructions to clone the drive. just be sure you do not delete your current drive until you know the ssd was cloned right and boots properly.

i used a different program which came with my ssd, and the clone was just wrong. screen flicked on and off and couldnt do anything once you got to desktop. so i booted back in to my original drive and found a third party program, macrium reflect, and used that to do the clone. that time it worked.