2019-01-10 23:26:14

Hey folks,
So recently, I purchased a 128 gigabyte Ssd for my computer. I did this because of the ever-increasing slowness of my spinning one, which would slow the performance of my entire laptop down. Anyway, later, I'll be installing this drive. I know how to install windows on it, as well as how to set it as my boot drive, there-bye giving me an extra terabyte of internal storage. But as this new drive isn't large enough to support a full clone of my other one, is there any way I could just grab the essentials, all my programs, there data, etc, etc, etc? Personal files I can do fine, because you just have to copy those to an external disk then copy them back onto the ssd. But with programs, not all data is stored in the same place. It's scattered around your system... program files, program data. appdata. the registry...
I've never done this before. So any help would sure be appreciated, as would pointing out something blindingly obvious that I'm missing here lol.

-
That Guy. Serving those people since that time. To contact, use that info.

2019-01-11 02:41:02

Do you have to clone? Is it not suitable to just clean install windows, then reinstall your software? Personally I'd be reluctant to clone a drive that's performing poorly. The HDs I've cloned were performing okay for HDs, I just wanted the boost of the SSD.

2019-01-11 02:55:31

I don't think you can do this, at least not in any automated fassion. You could try deleting any big apps that take up a lot of space to shrink the used space so it'll fit on your ssd, but the better bet is probably to deactivate any comersial software, clean install, and then reinstall apps. With a 128 gb ssd, you might also want to manage it's storage a little, so when reinstalling apps you should put apps you use infrequently / are very large on your mechanical drive, and things like your web browser, other frequently used apps on the ssd.

Roel
golfing in the kitchen

2019-01-11 03:18:30

Reinstalling my software... ehh. I wouldn't mind as much, except for I've used this computer for quite a while, and as such have accumulated a lot of data that I don't want to have to start over with. E.g. iTunes backups (not enough remaining space in iCloud) saved logins in firefox and chrome, s3 client configs, gitBash settings, etc, etc. Now, I know at least some of these things can be found in C:\users\name\program files or appdata. But I'm not entirely sure just how well programs would deal with old stuff being put in there without their having any prior knoledge of it. hence why I just want to pull everything over at once. But if I can't do it, that's fine. Just thought I'd ask here in case anybody knew of some obscure piece of software or other windows feature that would help me in this endeavour.

-
That Guy. Serving those people since that time. To contact, use that info.

2019-01-11 06:01:15 (edited by flackers 2019-01-11 06:06:49)

One thing I would say if you do decide to shrink your C drive down to get it to fit. I've found in the past sometimes it will only allow you to shrink it down to a size that's much larger than the actual amount of space taken up by files. It says this is due to unmovable files or something. Turning off system restore before shrinking fixed this for me.

2019-01-11 16:53:54

To follow along with your example, Windows will take up about a quarter of the space on your ssd, leaving you with roughly 95 gb to work with. I'm not sure how often you use your itunes backups, but 95 gb fills up very fast if you keep some large files on that drive. What you can do is not whipe windows from your old drive and install a new windows on your ssd, giving you two operating systems. You could selectively copy over data from your old drive to your new one, such as browser profiles.

Roel
golfing in the kitchen

2019-01-16 04:22:28

Well, for anyone still following this topic, I went ahead and installed a samsung ssd in the m2 slot on my computer's motherboard, at least I think that's what it's called. I put the bottom panel back on, opened the laptop, booted it up, and I don't see the new drive anywhere. It's not in disk manager, device manager, and it's not listed when I use diskpart to look for it. So I essentially can't install windows on this thing, because I can't even find it lol. Any of you folks ever had this problem? If so, do you all got any idea how I can fix it?

-
That Guy. Serving those people since that time. To contact, use that info.