Hard drive upgrade to SSD

[sdantonio]

OK not sure if this is the right area to post this question to:


I have a couple computers running on win 7 (one 32 bit, one 64 bit) and a 64 bit win 10 machine.


I recently got a hold of a few very nice 120 Gb SSD drives and would like to upgrade my machines in the following way. Win 7 and possibly a few key programs on the SSD and everything else on the old 1Tb magnetic drive (my current c: drive).


I am told that if I just put win 7 on the SSD and add it into the system as the c: drive and define the old drive with all my software on it as the d: drive (redirecting the shortcuts to d://...) then the registry will have a stroke and nothing will run right.


I am told that to do this right I have to clone the boot sector, windows files and registry onto the SSD and then it should all work.


How do I go about doing this. I would hate to have to reload all my software from scratch.


To quote the movie Philadelphia, explain this to me like your talking to a 6 year old please (no wait, 6 year olds understand more about computers than I do)


Thank you,
Steven

 

[samuria]

Welcome to the forum. What make are the SSD as most makers supply free software on their site to clone the drive the only problem is 7 then needs some settings changing. Put simply you use the makers software to copy your hd to the SSD remove old drive and it should work

 

[SevenFan]

It will only have a "stroke" if you do not prepare.

Start by reducing the size of C by moving your \users\Username data to a separate drive, easiest way is partition your existing Hard Drive, shrink the partition C and create a partition called say DATA.

Then go into properties of Documents, Pictures, Videos, Music and Downloads and on the Location tab set them to the new partion Data, as you move more data you can continue to shrink the Win drive C and increase the D drive.

I set my Win7 partion to 50gb but you can get it a bit lower if you have to by running disk cleanup and reducing systems files (if not already done).

Once you have all the data off C you might want to consider shrinking down your Windows profile(s), the easiest way to do this is to export what is useful such as bookmarks, copy any desktop links and then create a new profile, this will take up a fraction of the space. If you are sure you do not need anything in oldprofile you can delete it.

The is a free tool that will help you copy the system files to SSD, it has a wizard called migrate to SSD but it only copies the C drive, which is fine for most people. Then you can swap out the HD for SSD, hide the C partition on the Hard Drive and keep it as a backup, then put the old hard disk in a £6 external USB3 hd caddy and plug it into the USB port, finally make sure the drive letter of external hard disk data partition is set to D Windows will use the external disk.

The other option is to create a small partition for Data on the SSD and back that data up to the HD from time to time.

The free utility is called the Mini Partition Wizard tool, it runs under Windows and you can find boot CD versions online

Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Wizard Free

 

[Megahertz07]

I have a small SSD (128G) for windows and Linux and a HDD (1T) for data. Works great.
You will have to move all your data to a external disk (to make it smaller than 120G) clone the existing HDD to the SSD, format the existing HDD and then move C:\Users to D:\users and finally restore the data to the HDD.

I can guide you as I've done it many times