Installing two Windows 7 drives on new PC

[Renohughes]

Hello, my name is Reno and I have a question.
My current windows 7 ultimate edition PC has two drives I would like to transfer to a PC I am receiving as a gift.

A boot drive and a storage drive.

I would like to be able to use all of the programs/games access data on these drives.

Would it be as simple as installing the old drives in the new PC and then running my old programs from there? These drives are not very old and I am not particularly interested in replacing them as they are 10,000 rpm drives and I intend to use the cache feature of the SSD with them.

old specs:
motherboard: Asus P5ne SLI
video: 2x Nvidia 8800 GTX
HHDs: WD Raptor 150gig and caviar 500gig

new specs:
Motherboard Asus rampage extreme iv
Video 2x Asus Mars 2
HHDs intel 20 gig SSD for caching 2x 256 gig 3tb barracuda XT Front-mounted 3 Drive SATA Hotswap bay(where I intend to install the old drives)

Thank you for your time and assistance

 

[kajabla]

That should work just fine.
What convinced you to get such a massively expensive motherboard?
Intel SSD caching doesn't work very well, but it's better than nothing.

 

[Renohughes]

Actually thinking about it further if there were a way to copy everything from the two disks onto the 3tb that would be even better. I don't know much about migration though

 

[Paperdoc]

You probably will have an issue to fix, but I expect it can be done because you are moving from a fairly new PC to an even newer one.

The basic issue is that the old boot drive contains a customized installation of Win 7 that includes all the drivers necessary for the devices in your OLD machine, and may not have the correct drivers for the new machine you are moving to. To fix this you need the Win 7 Install CD. Having installed the two drives in the new machine, you put your Win 7 Install disk in the optical drive and boot from it as if you were going to install Win 7. BUT do NOT do a normal install. Choose a "REPAIR INSTALL" Procedure. This will compare all the drivers already on the boot drive against all the devices in the machine, and fix the mismatches. If it works (probably will , but not guaranteed) your machine will be able to boot and run properly.

 

[Renohughes]

That should work just fine.
What convinced you to get such a massively expensive motherboard?
Intel SSD caching doesn't work very well, but it's better than nothing.

Well the slot spacing for one, If I can't squeeze a sound card in there I at least know I might when I put the waterblocks on the GTX cards, really once you commit to $3000 on graphics plus the displays to use them nothing seems that expensive any more and you might as well go balls to the wall.

Then I just decided I wanted to test a lot of different things like SSD caching. and two SSDs in a raid 0(just for gaming and most of the files can be downloaded again from Steam nothing important lol)

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Would it be as simple as installing the old drives in the new PC and then running my old programs from there? These drives are not very old and I am not particularly interested in replacing them as they are 10,000 rpm drives and I intend to use the cache feature of the SSD with them.

If I am understanding you correctly, you have want to take the old HD's and stick them in the hot swap bays of the new puter and run programs off them. For the most part, no this is not going to work. Some programs are self contained.....that is all their files and everything that it takes to run are contained in their program folder. Most programs however, install some files on the boot drive and make "registry entries in the OS registry.

As the programs on the old drives, will not find those files on the new boot drive nor will it find the registry entries, the programs will not run.

Here's ya options.....

1. Dual boot.....each time you boot, choose whether to boot off the ....

a) Off the old drive(s), I assume the Raptor is the boot drive.
b) Off whatever is the boot drive in the new machine.

You must keep the same naming convention from the old / new boots for everything to work. In other words if Raptor was C:\ in the old machine, make sure the Caviar is D:\ (or whatever it was in old machine)

2. Reinstall programs over themselves.

Booting as you are in the new machine, the programs are going to exist on either the Raptor or Caviar. Let's say you Beanbag 2 on C:\Beanstuff\Beanbag 2 in the old box. Now the Raptor in the new box is say mapped as G:\

Install Beanbag 2 to G:\Beanstuff\Beanbag 2 over itself. This should not change the files on the Raptor and will even keep any customizations as the install won't write over any new files. The necessary registry entries and common files will however be written to C:\ (new box boot drive) and the program will work as normal. It will also still work if you put it back in the old machine.

 

[Renohughes]

Best answer selected by Renohughes.