Now I have data and programs on both hard drives. I'm not sure what to do next. Is there a way to migrate the data quickly? The Windows 7 tool seems to only work on externals.
Should I be designating one as a disk used to speed up the system or something?
Thanks in advance for any help.
Basically I'm merging two laptops. I've taken one hard drive from the less powerful laptop and added it into the secondary slot in another, more powerful laptop.
So, now I have two hard drives with documents, programs, and operating systems. Do I drag and drop and move all of a certain type of data onto one of them? It just seems like there is a better way for these to be used.
What do you want to do with the drive you moved over?
Use it as a storage drive for just data??
Use it as a boot drive??
If it's just data you are worried about, drag it around however you see fit.
Can you do both?
Isn't windows and many programs now on there twice?
You can't simply plug an HDD-B from another PC-B into your other PC-A and expect and expect it to run like it did in the original PC-B.
Send us a picture of your your HDD layouts by typing
Disk Management
in the bottom left search box.
Use the forums "paper clip" on the post toolbar and the Windows snipping tool to send the picture/screenshot. Identify the main/old HDD in the current PC and the one you added.
That wasn't even close to the issue. Can you read? Try hooked on phonics. It worked for me.
To give a logical answer to your questions, I am assuming certain things.
1. You have added the HDD to another laptop which already has windows installed.
2. You want to merge the data from second HDD with first HDD in the laptop.
What I suggest to you is that, provided you have enough free space on the laptop's original HDD, you can copy all the data files like DOC, XLS, PDF, TXT, JPG, BMP, and other user created files from the second hard disk to the first hard disk. Don't copy any OS related files like files from Windows, Program Files folders to the first hard disk.
Once this is over, you can remove the HDD and put it back in the old laptop.
Or if you want to keep this HDD permanently in the new laptop, format it and clean out so that the old OS is removed from it. Now you can use this hard disk as a data storage to your new laptop.
If you just want to use the HD from the other laptop as a data storage disk, you don't even have to format it. The Windows system that lives on that disk is in an inert state and you could simply delete the Windows folder and most of Program Files.
Formatting the drive fresh would be much more elegant, but if you don't want to copy all the data over or don't have enough space, this will do fine. However I recommend marking the partition on this HD as inactive.
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