Moving Stuff around

[Magoo]

ok so heres the thing i have 2 hard drives ( a big one TB with all os and a 250 GB with programs) and i basically want to swap the data so that the 1 tb has all my programs and the 250 has my os... now im wondering what the best most effective way to do this would be and the best way to not have any problems.... anything can help

oh and thank you in advanced

[ARchamps]

Use Acronis to clone them.. that would probably be the easiest. How much of the 1TB is free? If one of them is a WD drive, you could use the free edition. I did this a month ago when I got my new SSD and it took less than 20 mins.

[Magoo]

on the 1 tb i think about 800gb are free theres really not alot of stuff on there but the big issue is making sure my programs still work when i switch the drives

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

tbh this could get nasty - personally, i'd just reformat both drives and start fresh. surely youre not using ALL those programs daily or even frequently. you could probably just install them as you need them.

[neoraptor]

I would put everything on the 1tb and leave the 250gb as spare (backup or even get enclosure and make it external)

[+BudMan MVC]

I would guess that the 1TB is faster - might not be the case.. But generally speaking if the 250 is an older drive which from size would suggest. I would assume the 1TB is faster - so why would you want to move your OS to the 250?

So might be better since you have 800GB free on it to just copy your data over - you might have to change some shortcuts or even modify some paths in the registry for specific programs to get them to work, maybe have to modify your path statement as well? Or you could always just reinstall the programs to your 1TB drive, and then just copy over any saved data that might be on the 250 to your 1TB.. Then once everything working - just blow away your 250 and use as you want, be it scratch place for playing with stuff or sure as suggested turn it into an external.

But if you really just want to swap places, as long as there is space on the 250 to fit all the info from the 1TB. It would be best if you could take images of both drives to a different location. And then just write the images back to the drive you want.

If you do not have space to do this - you could always shrink the partition down to 500GB, then put images from both your 250 and your OS part into this partition. So now your sure you have a backup - and then just write the images to the drives you want with making the partitions size what you want.

Now normally you shouldn't have any isssues - but I Would be 110% sure you have backups of your critical files in a SAFE location before doing this. This should be the case anyway - you should always have backups of your critical stuff!! Be it your about to play with partitions and writing images or not.

[Magoo]

you know i didn't even think about just using the 250 as a backup (thats why i like it here) ... where usually in the registry are paths kept? and are they that hard to change?

[neoraptor]

start clean, you will never find all the places the paths are stored (it could be in registry or ini files or whatever).

[Magoo]

start clean, you will never find all the places the paths are stored (it could be in registry or ini files or whatever).

the thing is i have it customized just the way i want and i dont want to reinstall all the custom skins and programs that i use every day. dont get me wrong i do love a clean install its just getting to be too much of a hassle

[Fred Derf Veteran]

You can copy partitions with gParted or Partition Manager or something of that ilk. That should keep the paths the same and a bit of cable juggling should keep the drive letters the same as they were before.

This sort of thing is easier to do when you have a temporary drive to hold data while swapping things around. Backups are also good to have.

[neoraptor]

yeah that is a good idea if you make two partitions on the 1TB hdd so the letters remain the same you won;t have to change paths. Just resize the current partition, create new, copy the data from 250gb to 1tb, disconnect the 250gb and change drive letters so the new partition is the same letter as the 250gb was