Moving from two smaller HDDs to one larger one

Nirv

Nirv

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I currently have a drive setup as follows:

C:\ -- 120GB SSD as OS and main application drive
D:\ -- 500GB HDD with media and backups
E:\ -- 250GB HDD with secondary application installs

I am going to be replacing the two HDDs with a single 2TB drive (keeping the drives safe as their own backups), but want to maintain the same file structure and separation of media and programs as they are currently.

The most obvious way of doing this would be to install the 2TB, partition it (say into 2x 1TBs), then clone the D and E drives onto the two partitions. However, how can I be sure that programs installed on the E drive will work correctly after removing the original E drive - will drive letter still matter, and if so, can I change drive letter before Windows boot?

Secondly, it'd be ideal if I could make sure that the programs are installed to the initial partition for a bit more read/transfer performance, and the media kept to the "slower" drive portion.

Thanks for any suggestions, this is probably quite trivial though :)
 
Partition in two.
Clone E: to first partition. Rename partition to E:
Clone D: to second partition. Rename partition to D:

Drive letter will matter.
 
OK, as I suspected then. What about the drive letters of the old drives? Just rename them to other letters?
 
Here's how I would do it.

Put new drive in USB. Format one big partition and Call new partition F. Clone D to F. Afterwards create Backup sub folder in F root and move all folders in F to sub folder. Then Clone E to F. Change drive E to G. Change F to E.

You might have to remove the original drive E and restart in case it complains a program file is open when changing E to G.
 
Nirv said:
Thanks, will probably take this approach :)
Click to expand...
Maybe do Clone E to F first then copy D to backup subfolder in F instead in case your clone software thinks it must overwrite existing contents on F with the 2nd clone.
 
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