New Hard dirve

[ddo2]

I have a system up and running fine using W7 64 and I want to move Windows itself over to a SSD, but leave everything else on what is currently C, at least for now. Is this possible without doing a clean install? I don't think a mirroring program will work because the SSD is a fair bit smaller than the current C drive. I seem to recall when I did something like this in XP or Vista, there was an option in the install where it said soething like "I see you have a valid version already", would you like to move all the user info to the new location?" I did and all was well.

Breaking my software registry and having to reinstall everything would be brutal.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

A clean install is the only way to go!

 

[ddo2]

Sure a clean install is always nice, but it would take me a very very long time to install all my applications again. Like days. That's just not going to happen.

 

[sminlal]

I switched to an SSD and reinstalled everything, and my experience is that it's a helluva lot faster to to on an SSD than on a hard drive. The whole process was a lot less painful than I expected.

 

[ddo2]

Thanks, but my original clean install of W7 took 3 days with all the software. Painful. Maybe, sure the disk speed will help, but between loading all the discs physically, activating all the software with order numbers, where necessary, and other things, it just isn't something I want to go through again.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Well it might be easy of you used partitions when you set up ya PC.

If ya started out with say :

OS on C:\
Games on D:\
Programs on E:\
Data on F:\ ...... or whatever ......

ya can save yaself a lotta time.

1. Yank the SATA cable of the HD
2. Install Windows to SSD
3. Do all ya windows updates.
4. Reconnect HD.
5. Delete the Volume containing old C:\
6. Expand D:\ to include the free space where old C:\ was

Many games and some programs are "contained"......that is they don't need to mess with C:\ or Windows or registry. At the point you reach step 6, these will continue to run. If a program doesn't run, you simply need to install it over itself to supply whatever common files or registry entries the software developers seemed to think were necessary. Certainly not the easy solution you were looking for but much better than the alternative.

I just fell into this out of habit since I had usually done a reinstall every year between X-Mas and New Year's on my kid's boxes to get that back to some level performance and get rid of all the flotsam and jetsam. My son bought an SSD about a month ago, we used the procedure above and only had to reinstall about 1/4 of his stuff. Of course all data was stored on a separate partition and that needed no attention at all.