Question Noob Question

[Rainbow durag]

I have had a 1tb Hdd I’ve used for over a year with no ssd... I bought an SSD and put windows 10 on it as a boot drive, but now when I load my pc using the ssd as the primary boot drive, none of my files from the hdd work. The files all show up, but they don’t function. But if I run the pc with the hdd as the boot drive, everything works fine. I assume there’s something easy I’m missing? Thank you.

 

[AllanGH]

The windows installation on the SSD lacks the configuration that is needed (settings and installed programs, plus data files) to launch the appropriate application to handle the request you are making when you click on the files on your HDD.

In short, the SSD is the "untrained" new installation of windows. The HDD is the installation of windows that you have spent more than a year "training" to do your bidding.

Now, if you boot to the HDD, and make a list of all the programs that you installed, then boot to the SSD and install all those same programs, there, it will likely work the way that you want it to work.

 

[Rainbow durag]

The windows installation on the SSD lacks the configuration that is needed (settings and installed programs, plus data files) to launch the appropriate application to handle the request you are making when you click on the files on your HDD.

In short, the SSD is the "untrained" new installation of windows. The HDD is the installation of windows that you have spent more than a year "training" to do your bidding.

Now, if you boot to the HDD, and make a list of all the programs that you installed, then boot to the SSD and install all those same programs, there, it will likely work the way that you want it to work.

could I just copy/paste the windows folder from my HDD to Ssd?

 

[AllanGH]

No...you would assume that to be something that works, but windows buries information about installed programs and application launch file associations in the registry and within a huge number of other configuration files.

It's just not going to work.

Now, if your HDD and SSD are the same size, you can clone the HDD to the SSD. which would duplicate your earlier installation to the new SSD; and that's probably what you had envisioned for the new drive.

For drive cloning, I tend to recommend a hardware-based cloning solution:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N1KXE9K
over software cloning.