How to install Windows on an SSD and move certain files onto it?

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ErickD24

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Apr 4, 2015
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Hello. I am getting a new SSD in about a week and currently own a 1 TB Western Digital Caviar blue drive. I would like to have only my operating system and certain games installed on the SSD and use my HDD as my main file storage. From what I've heard, there's no easy way of doing this... I apparently should freshly install windows onto the SSD. However I am confused about how to do this.

Do I install windows onto this SSD while still having the operating system on my hard drive? How does that work? Won't the two conflict with each other...?

If anyone can tell me how to do this with specific details it will be greatly appreciated. I am sort of new in this area as this is the first computer I have ever built, so I'm a little clueless as to how I can pull this off without losing data.
 
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Eximo
Generally you would want to leave the 1TB drive out of the system during a fresh OS install to an SSD.

If you are talking about keeping your existing OS and migrating it to the new drive you would need to decrease the data stored to below what the formatted SSD can hold and use a cloning utility. The reason this is difficult is things like installed game files. If that is the bulk of your data and not just easily transferred files, then you will have to re-install all of your programs anyway. Or go line by line through the registry, which is a monumental task.

Steam libraries are pretty easy to move, since it will all be automated on the backend for you once you point it to the installation folder.

But to successfully do all that...
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Gingerbread

Gingerbread

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Nov 2, 2009
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Well there is software out there to do this clean but generally the clean solution is save your important files to an USB or something (they should not be that big in size), format hdd and install windows on ssd. If you don't have enough space for everything, first install OS on SSD, then move important files from HDD to SSD, then format HDD. The two OS wont conflict each other since you will select an active on at startup and the other will just be there.
 
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Eximo

Eximo

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May 27, 2010
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Generally you would want to leave the 1TB drive out of the system during a fresh OS install to an SSD.

If you are talking about keeping your existing OS and migrating it to the new drive you would need to decrease the data stored to below what the formatted SSD can hold and use a cloning utility. The reason this is difficult is things like installed game files. If that is the bulk of your data and not just easily transferred files, then you will have to re-install all of your programs anyway. Or go line by line through the registry, which is a monumental task.

Steam libraries are pretty easy to move, since it will all be automated on the backend for you once you point it to the installation folder.

But to successfully do all that with just the two drives would require shrinking your existing volume, creating a new partition, moving anything you don't want to end up on the SSD to the new partition, possibly re-sizing both partitions as you go. Then cloning the new smaller OS partition to the SSD. All completely possible, but if you are new to it, and don't want to risk all that getting messed up, it is better to start fresh, then delete the OS from the old drive.

Having a third spare 1TB drive would be another way to avoid all the re-sizing.

And it really depends on how full your drive is.
 
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