Storage Shenanigans with a new SSD

[thetroll34461]

So I bought an SSD, I already had a WD Blue 1TB hdd in my pc running fine with my windows installed on it. I popped the SSD into my PC, installed Windows on it, booted up and low and behold all my stuff is gone off my desktop... and I can't really access any of my things on my hdd, but I have transferred some games onto the ssd to save the time of redownloading them. So how can I properly set up my hdd and ssd to work together. Do I need to wipe my hdd?
Thanks!

 

[racksmith101]

You should have cloned your hdd to your ssd, shut down your pc, unplugged your hdd, rebooted into BIOS and selected the SSD as boot device. You could have then re-added your hdd and formatted it. Everything would have been copied over.

 

[Solandri]

Frequently, you cannot clone a HDD to a SSD because the files on the HDD exceeds the size of of the SSD. I assume your Windows installation is still on the HDD? (i.e. you can remove the SSD and the HDD will still boot.)

The correct procedure in that case is to buy an external drive. This will be used to help with your migration, but afterwards it will be used to make backups. You MUST be making backups. The most common difficult-to-solve problem I get tasked with is recovering deleted or corrupted (frequently overwritten) files. I'm only successful part of the time, and it just leaves me feeling crappy the rest of the day over the person's loss when it's so easily preventable by making backups.

Once you have the backup drive:

■Copy files (like games - Steam is very good about letting you move the entire steam folder) to the backup drive. Do this until the size of files on the internal HDD is less than the size of the SSD. I say copy, not move, because copying is safer than moving. Once you've confirmed the copy was successful, you can delete the original from the internal HDD.
■Clone the internal HDD (entire drive, not just the OS partition) to the SSD. Your cloning software should be able to shrink the HDD's partition to fit in the SSD since most of it is now empty.
■Detach the internal HDD. Boot with only the SSD attached to confirm that it's bootable on its own.
■Reattach the internal HDD and format it. Use it as a data drive.
■Copy all the stuff you moved in step 1 from the backup drive back to the SSD or internal HDD.
■Install a backup program like Macrium Reflect Free. Use that to backup your entire system (SSD and internal HDD) to the external backup drive.
■Since you now have a backup, you can safely delete from the backup drive that you copied to the system two steps ago.
■Put the backup drive in a safe place, preferably outside your home (take it to work). Once a week, bring it back and refresh your backups.

I'll also add a warning to never put a pagefile on the WD Blue drive. That drive has a head parking issue which will cause massive problems with stutters and lag if you put a pagefile on it. Ideally, you shouldn't even put games on it. If you do have to put your games on it and experience stutters, PM me and I can direct you to a fix.

 

[mdd1963]

If your existing drive has but one partition, and the used space not too large, the partition can be shrunk to allow cloning to the (presumably) smaller SSD...(for instance, a 1 TB drive using ony 150 GB of space shrunk to 465 GB, etc..)

(But of course if you did a fresh install to the new SSD, the old apps/docs are still on the original hard drive, linked to/part of the original WIndows install in that location....)