Moving Program Files to another drive with same OS?

[jari.smile]

Hi,

My old hard drive is about to fail so i bought an SSD thinking i could clone all the data to the SSD. However, this didnt work and I got alot of reading errors (probably because the drive is just too old). I did manage to clone the operating system though.

So now I'm wondering: is it possible to boot from the cloned OS located on the SSD, and manually copy all the program files and other program data from the old drive to the new SSD, without having to reinstall all the programs??

My theory is that the registry is unchanged and therefore it should think nothing changed, and run the programs, is this true?

Thanks in advance!

 

[USAFRet]

Hi,

My old hard drive is about to fail so i bought an SSD thinking i could clone all the data to the SSD. However, this didnt work and I got alot of reading errors (probably because the drive is just too old). I did manage to clone the operating system though.

So now I'm wondering: is it possible to boot from the cloned OS located on the SSD, and manually copy all the program files and other program data from the old drive to the new SSD, without having to reinstall all the programs??

My theory is that the registry is unchanged and therefore it should think nothing changed, and run the programs, is this true?

Thanks in advance!

1. No, that won't work.

2. How, specifically, did you clone only the OS?

 

[jari.smile]

I cloned the system partition to the SSD, which succeeded, but now that I think of it... that probably isnt the entire OS...

 

[USAFRet]

I cloned the system partition to the SSD, which succeeded, but now that I think of it... that probably isnt the entire OS...

And how large was this 'system partition'?
Under 1GB? Maybe 100MB or 450MB?

 

[jari.smile]

It was just 100MB.

Some thinking brought me to another question kinda related to this:

Is it possible to do a Windows backup to the SSD and restore that data to that same SSD?

 

[USAFRet]

It was just 100MB.

Some thinking brought me to another question kinda related to this:

Is it possible to do a Windows backup to the SSD and restore that data to that same SSD?

"100MB" was not the OS. At all.
That was the boot partition. Windows has not fitin within '100MB' in over 20 years.

So, let's see what we can do here.
Your previous clone attempt failed, due to errors reading from the failing HDD?

You probably left it too late. That drive seems to be too hosed to clone from.


And your concept of a windows backup to the SSD, and recover to that same drive...that won't work.

 

[jari.smile]

Yes correct, the cloning failed because its probably too late already XD.

I did some research and I will need another external storage device for the other idea to work.. I will just try that and if all fails just drag the important stuff over and clean install

Thanks for the help!

 

[USAFRet]

Yes correct, the cloning failed because its probably too late already XD.

I did some research and I will need another external storage device for the other idea to work.. I will just try that and if all fails just drag the important stuff over and clean install

Thanks for the help!

Other way around.
Clean install, and then copy your personal files (not applications).