Need help swapping to SSD

michaelp · 13 Feb 2013 at 19:52

I was thinking of swapping my laptops HDD for an SSD I have lying around and putting the HDD into a caddy for storage. However I don't want to have to do a fresh install of my OS, programs and games.

So the question is can I do some sort of clone of the things that I would like to transfer to the new SSD. Then what would happen if i tried running a program off of the caddy would i need to recreate all my shortcuts and such to match the new file path?

It seems pretty troublesome swapping to an SSD when Im not installing everything fresh.

wazza300 · 13 Feb 2013 at 19:57

how big is the hdd? if its smaller than the ssd then clone it across,if not just do clean install on ssd and use the hdd when need be,delete/re install what you need and don't need ect

michaelp · 13 Feb 2013 at 20:18

500gb used on the HDD only got 240gb on the SSD the biggest issue with a fresh install is all the games I would need to re-download from steam and then there's wanting to keep the same save game.

bishi · 13 Feb 2013 at 22:11

Steam is the exception actually. Just copy the files over onto the new drive and run the steam.exe file and it should run as it did on the other computer. You don't need to 'reinstall' as such. Steam should fill in any missing stuff for you.

Make sure you copy over your old my documents folder in case any games store their saves there and haven't synced properly (again steam cloud should sort this for you).

Other games that rely on a multitude of reg entries outside Steam you will probably want to reinstall though.