[SOLVED] New PC (install windows 10 on New SSD and just connect the old hard drive without formatting)

[Amatex]

Hello all,

So as the title suggests if I install windows 10 on my new SSD. (drive A)
Can I then plug my old harddrive in (Drive B) without formatting and change the registry to use the old (Drive B) location for my user files and Program Files, Appdata folders etc.

Thanks, Amatex.

 

[Darkbreeze]

No, you can't.

You will need to reinstall your applications and programs. There ARE programs out there that claim to be able to re-associate all the registry entries to point to the old locations, but not only do they not work, they usually end up corrupting the new Windows installation as well.

For game files and loaders, you CAN do this, because those are typically not installed with the same type of registry heavy associations, so if all your game file are in one location you can generally move them to another location and then point the loader to the new location. Installed programs and applications won't work the same way.

If you do a clean install of Windows, you WILL need to reinstall ALL your programs.

 

[Amatex]

Okay thank you,
I'm okay with reinstalling all apps/programs, and all of my games are on a different portable hard drive.

I guess my next question is can I just plug in my old C: drive and just use it as a storage device without formatting?
that way I can just have everything from my old computer on it transferred over as long as it's not set to boot it from the bios I should be fine right?

Thanks

 

[Darkbreeze]

Anything on the old C: drive that isn't specifically just a "file" or "document", that you want to keep, should be considered useless when it comes to trying to use it with the new system. You can't "use" anything from the old installation unless you boot from that drive and having two drives with an EFI boot partition is going to do nothing but cause problems. You want to install Windows on the new drive, and you want to pull anything you need to keep such as music, movies, files, folders, documents, etc. from the old drive and back them up elsewhere and then delete ALL of the existing partitions on that drive, including the hidden EFI and system partitions, and then create a new simple partition on that drive for use as storage.