Transfering Large HDD to Boot Drive SDD

[Shadowhaan]

Hello guys,
I have a 1 TB hard drive and I have used up about 900 GB of it with many games and programs. I recently bought a 120 GB PNY SSD to use as a boot drive. I was wondering if there was a way I could transfer only windows to my SSD and leave my games and programs on my hard drive.

 

[Gam3r01]

You should do a clean install of windows on to the SSD, and then reinstall your programs on the SSD as well.

 

[Shadowhaan]

You should do a clean install of windows on to the SSD, and then reinstall your programs on the SSD as well.

If I clean install windows onto the SSD, will I have to rebuy it? Also if I reinstall windows on the SSD, how can I use my hard drive as the drive for my games?

 

[Gam3r01]

You can reuse your product key, just make sure its linked to your microsoft account (google can help you with this).
From there, you just unplug your HDD, install windows on the SSD, and plug the HDD back in when youre all done installing.
Then in the BIOS you set the SSD to boot first, and the HDD will just show up as a storage drive in windows. You can then point steam, origin, etc to where the games are installed.

 

[Shadowhaan]

You can reuse your product key, just make sure its linked to your microsoft account (google can help you with this).
From there, you just unplug your HDD, install windows on the SSD, and plug the HDD back in when youre all done installing.
Then in the BIOS you set the SSD to boot first, and the HDD will just show up as a storage drive in windows. You can then point steam, origin, etc to where the games are installed.

Will I need to completely wipe my hard drive before installing windows onto the SSD?

 

[Gam3r01]

Nope! The HDD will remain with all its data, just disconnect it during install.

 

[Shadowhaan]

Nope! The HDD will remain with all its data, just disconnect it during install.

I'm sort of confused. I understand the part where I have to reinstall windows on the SSD. I'm confused about the part where I leave all the files on my HDD and reinstall the programs to the hard drive even though they are already there?

 

[Gam3r01]

You should reinstall the programs to the SSD, not the HDD.
Basically, your programs arent going to like running off a different drive than the boot drive, and they should simple be reinstalled on the SSD.