How can I use my old HDD with my new SSD?

[ad5os]

Hi gang,



This is what I got.
I have a 750G HDD with a lot of professional video and audio programs installed. I have quite a lot of personal files under User. I also have an external HDD dock that I use to store project files. I bought a small 64gig SSD for my OS drive and to run some native 64bit programs. I am using win 7 64bit ultimate. 6G of ram.


This is what I want

to reinstall windows 7 on the new ssd then keep my x86 programs and user directory on the 750G.


Is this possible? any programs or how to's out there.



I have already tried a program called Paragon migrate os to ssd. But it's buggy and takes FOREVER!!!! I'd rather just install windows and use some other program to link to the other hd.


I have been using this station for a few years and it has been good to me that I would rather upgrade it than just buy a new computer, especially since when I went to buy a new sandy bridge yesterday and they told me the motherboards are being recalled. anyway i digress.. I just need my windows os and adobe CS5 suite on the SSD really.. I guess I can just reinstall everything but I literally have like 100 programs and plugins already installed.

any help would be greatly appreciated!

AD5OS

 

[WyomingKnott]

I'll try to end this with a link to another discussion on the subject. You might search the forum; this is not an uncommon topic.

Reinstall Win7 on the new SSD is spot-on. It's a good idea to unplug all the SSDs when you do this, to make sure that BIOS can boot directly from the SSD and not need a boot manager on the HDD to start.

You can configure Win7 to keep My Documents on another drive; it should be as easy as right-clicking on My Documents once it's created (but empty) and changing the Properties. There is also a policy that can be set in the registry to move all new My Documents folders, but I don't know how to do this.

Keeping the programs on another drive is more difficult. Some installations prompt for an alternative installation directory, and for those you could specify a directory on the other drives. For other programs, I don't know if this can be done.

As for running the programs that are already installed on the other drive from this OS, in most cases it will not work. Most Windows programs have hooks in the registry and possibly .inf files in /windows or dlls in /windows/system32. These days, unless a program is deliberately made to be "portable," it has to be installed into the OS that is running.

What you could try to do is to use the Migration tool that Microsoft provides for the installation of Windows 7. I have never used it, but I understand that it is more often than not successful in re-installing an application that ran in your old environment into the new one (of course, in this case, you would have to ignore my advice to remove the HDDs during installation).

Edit:

Have a look at our member's guide to SSD configuration: http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/solid-state-drive-ssd-tweaks-for-windows-7/552.html

My apologies; I am not seeing a recent SSD / HDD system config thread to link to. It must be a bad day for me not being able to find one; they are common.

 

[ad5os]

Thank you so much.. that is exactly what I was hoping to hear to do. I will try to use the windows migration program as well.

Also I already partitioned and aligned my RealSSD C300 to 1024 is that good? Should I just let windows 7 re-partition and align everything to 4k? I think I read that 512 being the NAND errase block would be is the native or smallest alignment. Can I squeeze even more data on my disk if I align to 512 instead of 4k?

I am wondering if I just start the installation and it already sees the data in those directories that I can just let it over write them and all the other files that may have been added later can just stay... or maybe say DONT overwrite and it will just keep them there. Well I will let you know if that worked!

 

[ad5os]

Alright I am on the other side of the SSD. Install went smooth.

I created a different user name now I am going to see if I can migrate the user... it was going to create a 400 meg file to convert but I am going to see if I can just somehow rig it so I create the user and have it point to the old user.

Anyone ever done that? I just have tons of crap on this drive.. I want to make sure everything is going to work on here before I erase stuff like the windows folder on the HDD in case I need to log in on that partition.