Migrating from HDD to SSD

korthos

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Feb 2, 2009
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Just got a crucial m4 64gb SSD for a boot drive for my Win7 desktop. Currently have two 1tb drives, one storage, one is current boot drive. Figured I'd be able to install the SSD as a boot disk, and keep all of my programs, media, etc on the other two drives. Easy enough, I can make that happen.

However, setting up the SSD to mirror all of my personal settings, and user profile (which is relatively small, <5gb), windows settings, and to recognize all of my audio/video codecs, associated filetypes, etc., well, that's become a problem. The personal customization takes a ton of time, not to mention manually linking the programs, start menu, e tc from scratch.

I've done some research, and many guides suggest using the Easy Transfer wizard (Worked, moved files, and that's -it-, no settings, filetypes, etc), Paragon Migrate, or several other imaging/ghost programs to move my current windows partition over to the SSD. My current partition is roughly 120gbused out of 180gb, which is obviously more than my SSD can hold.

So, have I missed something somewhere? I'd like to keep all programs on the HDD, storage as well, just move tthe user profile, and all associated settings to the SSD. plus start menu shortcuts, desktop shortcuts etc. I assumed this was going to be easy, but if anyone point to a resource that I may have missed, or have advice, it'd be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!
 

Traildriver

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Sep 10, 2010
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It will be easier in the long run to uninstall the HDDs and install the SSD by itself. Install a fresh OS on the SSD. Reattach the HDDs. Uninstall and reinstall the programs so the new OS install on the SSD can recognize the programs. That way the Windows registry will have all the correct values
 

korthos

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Feb 2, 2009
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While being the safest, it sounds like rebuilding the HDD and SSD from ground up. Which means having to manually backup any data, uninstall everything, clean the drives, then reinstall from scratch. Which also means manually tweaking settings and so forth. Which is what I was trying to avoid, because that's a full day of work most likely.