Moving OS to an SSD, can I save my drivers to my external hard drive?

[Nordwrath]

Hi,
so, I'm thinking about buying an SSD and putting my OS (Windows 10) on it, and as far as I know you are supposed to format your original HDD when installing the OS to an SSD and using it as a Boot device, but due to the fact that my internet speed is really slow (~250 KB/s down), downloading and installing Drivers for nVidia, Intel etc. is kind of a pain and can take up to ~2 hours of only downloading and installing drivers, do my GPU and my CPU recognize their drivers if they are saved on my external hard drive and I plug it in after the clean install of Windows on the SSD?

Thanks,
Nordwrath

 

[George Mulligan]

Many SSD manufacturers also provide "migration" software, which will allow you to migrate your OS, drivers, and data files if you choose, to your new SSD. This means you would not have to re-install the OS or the drivers.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

If you already have the .exe driver installers on your PC, this should work. However, you may be left with old drivers.

I don't believe there's any way to export the drivers if you already deleted the installers.

One option would be to clone your HDD to your SSD instead of reinstalling - this means you also won't have to reinstall Windows updates.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

To install the drivers on to a fresh Windows installation you need to have already saved each driver's installation package which you originally downloaded from their respective websites (since a driver won't install without it's installation package).

If you didn't save those installation packages, you will have to download them again.

If you can't get connected to the internet on your Windows 10 PC because of a missing network driver, you can use any PC with an internet connection to download them on to a pen drive, then transfer them to your Windows 10 PC.

Of course, if you are cloning Windows 10 from from an HDD on the same system, the cloned copy will include all installed drivers anyway so there is no need to download them again.

 

[Nordwrath]

So... if I'll be using the Samsung Migration Software (It'll be a Samsung EVO 850 250 GB), do I have to set the UEFI BIOS to AHCI before I migrate my OS over to the SSD, or to I have to do it afterwards?

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Any moderately recent system will have the BIOS set to AHCI by default.

I wouldn't worry.