New Windows Installation

wildest_jjk · 23 Apr 2014 at 19:38

Hi guys,

So I'm upgrading my SSD which currently has just my Windows 7 installation and program files on. Something I have had set for a while is I have changed the location of the My Documents folder etc to a different drive.

If I leave my data hard drive but reinstall Windows on the new drive will this cause problems? Is there anything else I need to do?

Thanks

KIA · 23 Apr 2014 at 20:57

Why don't you clone the current drive using Macrium Reflect instead of reinstalling?

If you do decide to reinstall, disconnect the data drive before you kick off the installation.

wildest_jjk · 23 Apr 2014 at 21:15

Thanks for the response.

I want to start a fresh really to be honest. The issue is that I changed the actual location of the My Documents folder in their properties. I can see that when I change the Windows drive I will end up with two My Documents folders. Will this matter?

KIA · 24 Apr 2014 at 15:30

It shouldn't matter. You will have to change the location of My Docs after the installation has finished.

Disconnect the HDD during installation and backup important My Docs data, just in case.

wildest_jjk · 27 Apr 2014 at 13:25

Just for everyone's reference, here is what I did:

I disconnected the data drive and installed Windows on my SSD. Once Windows was fully installed I did have some issues moving the new personal folders onto the data drive. As mentioned this was due to the personal files of an old install already being on this drive.

To get around this I moved all of the old personal folders into an empty folder on the same data drive. Then I moved the new folders from my SSD to this data drive. Next I changed the owner, permissions etc of the empty folder I created with all the old personal folders contained within. This shouldn't need much changing as it was created during the new Windows install.

One of the important steps is to tick 'Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object'. By doing this it gives the corect ownership, permissions etc to all of the folders within. Finally I moved all of my old files out of the old personal files and into the newly created personal folders that were mentioned earlier.

Again this seemed to work for me but there are probably better ways of doing this. Anyway thanks KIA for your help

Cheers!