Couple questions before upgrading

[EETnick]

Ok, so I've searched around a little bit, and I haven't quite found the exact answers to my questions. Here's the situation. A couple years back I built a nice rig with a 60GB SSD for Win7 and a 1TB drive for storage. Now my 60GB is full. It keeps buzzing me with the "0MB remain" warning, and the OS has suffered huge performance decline. I've run out of things that I think I can erase from the OS disk, SO I shelled out for a new 480GB SSD to replace it...

Now my question is this, can I just power the whole thing down, open it up, and change them out without trouble on the other drive? Will windows have a fit recognizing the files on my storage drive? I only ask because I seem to remember creating a partition the first time, and I'm not sure how that would work with a clean install. I'm kind of suspicious about some of the old software I put on my old SSD, and I really don't want to clone it, I want to do a clean install, but not if its going to create all sorts of new problems. Thanks in advance for your input!

 

[ja6on]

I would take out the old ssd, then fit the new one then install win7 and all the updates and drivers etc. then connect the old drive.

*You will prob find the 'user' folder is your problem. you should have put the 'user' folder on the storage drive.

 

[Jake-]

From what i understand, you do not wish to clone the drive because of programs that might be infected? or no longer needed. However you dont want to do a fresh install because of possible problems.

A fresh install will probably be your best option, just ensure your SSD has the latest firmware installed before you proceed, its risky once the OS is installed.

Next up remove all other drives, and install the OS (with recovery partition is it asks). As said, proceed with installing all your hardware's software, windows updates and everything else that makes your PC user friendly.

Now you can plug you other drives in, and transfer any files *not programs* to your new SSD if required, one may be your hidden AppData folder on C://.

*You will prob find the 'user' folder is your problem. you should have put the 'user' folder on the storage drive.

Even will my SSD's, its the User data that used up the most of it / or games.

I have 4 HDD's now and 2 SSD's and i use mklinks to ensure all my data gets saved where i want it.

See my video: Install Steam Games on different drives / split the steamapps folder - YouTube
You will want to skip to 4:24 for the simple mklink code.

This ensures game saves and downloads o straight to your D: drive rather than C:

Hope this helps