Operating System Transfer

[Littlenose]

The young lad's PC is getting a bit wheezy, and I'm trying to keep it alive with a few upgrades here and there.
The bottle neck at the moment is that it's running on an old machanical hard drive, which is showing some bad sectors. I'd like to change this to an SSD, but all the disk copy methods I've tried have failed - I lost a weekend to trying this, even put the old hard drive on my main machine to try there too.
Is there a standarad way of getting an OS transferred to a new drive without copying data directly? Sort of like asking the computer to install win11 to another drive with the settings intact rather than copy it directly?
The issue with a complete fresh install it involves a teenager with issues and recalling passwords

 

[Littlenose]

I tried several methods, I can't remember all the methods / tools, but it did include:

• Seagate
• Acronis
• EaseUS
• Windows

 

[Littlenose]

I do have an external drive that I can try this with... cheers

 

[Littlenose]

cool... we will give it a try this comign weekend and see how we get on. I will report back

 

[Littlenose]

It's not windows password... but all the other stuff like his Steam* account etc.

It might be Steam, it might be hotmail, or orhter multitudes of things... I tend not to question the teenager too much or things go backwards

 

[Littlenose]

Well, I hadn't expected that angle of discussion... and I'm not prepared to engage.

 

[Littlenose]

It's fair enough, and I'm hoping that this escapade we're going through starts the ball rolling.
It sounded like you were heading into parenting advice, which is something I'm not prepared to discuss here.
All good

 

[Littlenose]

thanks everyone... we will take a look and see waht we can do when he's next interested in wanting to try the new drive.