I need some direction in sorting out three drives.

axlrose

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Thanks for any help. I have a system I built on my own, so I have some basic skills, but I'm having trouble tackling a storage issue and was looking for some basic help.

I have a 120gb ssd with windows 7 on it that I purchased when I purchased two new gpu's about a year and a half ago. The computer had been running vista on a velociraptor. I decided to make it so that each drive could boot windows (one using seven and one using vista) but what I'm seeing is that I rarely need to boot to vista and now both of my drives are full.

I also have a 500gb back up, external drive that should be of use here I think, that was actually supposed to actively back up the two drives (that are less than 500gb total) but I never figured out how to actively back them up so the drive has just been hanging out doing nothing.

I am thinking it's time to make my ssd with windows 7 the only windows drive because I am ending up taking up a lot of space with files that are on both drives. I believe all of my games that load through Steam take up space on both drives for example. I'm thinking I can better set this up so that my ssd doesn't have to carry these other files if I only use my second drive for these files, but I don't seem to be able to set it up that with with separate windows versions on both drives. Does that sound right?

Short Version - I'm close to out of space on both drives and I want to make them more efficient so that I don't have files that seemingly need to be on both drives.

Thanks!
 

sturm

Splendid
I would dump Vista, pains me to even type it, in a heart beat. What you need to do is remove the boot option to load vista so it goes straight into Win 7. Google search will help with that. Once that is done you can change the steam folder to point to the HDD. You can also change the location for all of your "My Doc, video, picture" folders to point to the HDD, saving space on the SSD.
Any games you had on vista, I would just reinstall, once you have backedup the game saves.

Windows 7 has a backup feature that you can run automatic backups if you want or use a 3rd party program if you want. You could even do it manually if you so choose.
 

axlrose

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I am copying over any files that mean anything to me from my hhd to my external back up drive right now. My plan is to wipe the drive after that. There are probably files I want on there for something, but honestly, I haven't used the drive much in months (maybe more) so I figure there probably isn't anything I NEED just by that time frame.

After I have moved my photos etc. over, how do I wipe the drive clean?

And then can I simply move the files from my external drive back over by dragging and copying again?

And then will the two drives work together so that I can boot 7 on my ssd and still run games on the hhd?

Of course, thank you for your help.
 

axlrose

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Okay. So I straightened out the drives, downloaded futuremark and ran through it three times. I downloaded steam and started downloading my games over again. I just went down to check on the status of the downloads and I arrived to a bios screen. I pressed F1 to boot and was told there was a bootmgr problem. Press control alt delete to restart and my computer no longer sees my ssd boot drive at all!
 

axlrose

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Alright, used the install cd and my computer is seeing the ssd drive again and the startup files are good again, I think. Still unstable, still green artifacts. What's going on?