Win 7 on both drives?

[MasterVentris]

So I currently have a 1TB HDD in my pc, which is about half full. Seeing as though this is now the bottleneck in my pc I am looking at getting an SSD as a boot drive, with a few commonly used programs on it aswell.

I was wondering if when I installed windows on the SSD, I would still be able to use the HDD and access the files on it. I can't afford a SSD with enough capacity to do a complete transfer of files.

Would there be any conflicts if I did this? Drive letters not matching? Not being able to access program files installed under a different windows install? Things like that really.

A complete format and reinstall is not entirely off the cards, but the excruciatingly slow internet I am stuck with atm makes the prospect of redownloading everything quite scary.

 

[ChileanLlama]

If you go down the clean install route, just disconnect your old drive during the install. All the data will be intact when you reconnect it. At worse you'll have to go into Disk Management and assign a drive letter to the partition(s) on your old disk.

The problem with this approach is that a lot of programs will rely on settings and registry entries and simply won't run correctly from your old drive. So you would have to reinstall those programs.

Another option is to repartition your existing drive and move all your data to the new partition. Keep the OS and applications to within the capacity of your new SSD and then clone (using some thing like Macrium Reflect) the C:\ partition from your old drive to your new drive.

You may still need to reinstall some programs if you couldn't fit them all on to the SSD, but otherwise you'd be up and running where you left off.

In both cases once you have your OS and apps installed you can remove the old partitions from your old drive that you no longer need, like the System Reserved and old C:\ and extend your "data" partition to use the whole of your old disk.