Moving Windows 7 from SSD C: Drive to D: Drive

[Anomaly1964]

I have an SSD drive that I have Windows 7 installed on. I try to only install a game or two at at time on that drive when I want to play but the drive only has about 338MB of space left on it. How can I move the operating system to my traditional D: drive and just load games on the SSD drive?

Thanks for your help in advance!

 

[Mushkins]

You can't move an installed operating system to a new disk like that. You'd need to do a full reinstall of Windows on the disk you want it to be on, then format the other disk and repartition it as a secondary drive.

 

[Anomaly1964]

You can't move an installed operating system to a new disk like that. You'd need to do a full reinstall of Windows on the disk you want it to be on, then format the other disk and repartition it as a secondary drive.

Re-partition it?

I guess I would need to set up the new Drive as the main boot disc as well, right?

 

[Mushkins]

Re-partition it?

I guess I would need to set up the new Drive as the main boot disc as well, right?

Correct. Note that you will lose *all* data on both of these disks. Back up your stuff.

 

[Anomaly1964]

Correct. Note that you will lose *all* data on both of these disks. Back up your stuff.

Is there a guide somewhere of what files you can safely remove from your C: drive to free up space?

 

[Ketchup]

What is the size of the SSD?

 

[Mushkins]

Is there a guide somewhere of what files you can safely remove from your C: drive to free up space?

Nothing you can remove from a boot drive is going to make any truly meaningful difference in space, and cutting out chunks of the OS is a recipe for a system that wont boot.

The best you can do would be to move the hibernation file (might save 5GB?) and regularly run Disk Cleanup to get rid of old windows update install files and temp files.

 

[Blintok]

why not just keep the SSD for just Windows 7 and use the traditional drive for games?
That is what most have done when 120g SSD were still expensive. SSD for OS and traditional drive for everything else..

 

[Mushkins]

why not just keep the SSD for just Windows 7 and use the traditional drive for games?
That is what most have done when 120g SSD were still expensive. SSD for OS and traditional drive for everything else..

That kind of defeats the purpose of putting an SSD in a gaming machine. You want your games to benefit from the much faster disk read times, whereas the OS taking an extra minute to load is meaningless.

 

[sweenish]

why not just keep the SSD for just Windows 7 and use the traditional drive for games?
That is what most have done when 120g SSD were still expensive. SSD for OS and traditional drive for everything else..

This is correct.

That kind of defeats the purpose of putting an SSD in a gaming machine. You want your games to benefit from the much faster disk read times, whereas the OS taking an extra minute to load is meaningless.

This is garbage. Slow down the ENTIRE machine by putting the OS on platters, so that games loading goes a couple seconds faster, although they probably wouldn't because your OS is on platters. That's what you'd be doing.

I mean, do people get on a shooter, die, and then go "Man, if only this game were on an SSD?"

 

[Ketchup]

That kind of defeats the purpose of putting an SSD in a gaming machine. You want your games to benefit from the much faster disk read times, whereas the OS taking an extra minute to load is meaningless.

Maybe it's just the games I play, but I have several games on a hard drive due to:
1. 250 GB not going quite as far as I thought
2. The SSD is used for my virtual machines, and host OS, which seem to show the most benefit
And honestly, the games run fine. Sure there is a bit longer a break between stories, missions, levels, races, etc, but actual gameplay is fine off a traditional hard drive. And before you ask, I did run many of the games on the SSD before switching to the hard drive, to make sure it was a difference I could life with.

 

[Mushkins]

Maybe it's just the games I play, but I have several games on a hard drive due to:
1. 250 GB not going quite as far as I thought
2. The SSD is used for my virtual machines, and host OS, which seem to show the most benefit
And honestly, the games run fine. Sure there is a bit longer a break between stories, missions, levels, races, etc, but actual gameplay is fine off a traditional hard drive. And before you ask, I did run many of the games on the SSD before switching to the hard drive, to make sure it was a difference I could life with.

I mean that's fine, and it all depends on what kind of games you're playing. In some games load times and asset pop-in can be significant gameplay issues. If your VMs are more important than gaming performance by all means prioritize your SSD space in that way.

Most people building specifically gaming PCs are focused on having the best possible gaming performance.

 

[imagoon]

I mean that's fine, and it all depends on what kind of games you're playing. In some games load times and asset pop-in can be significant gameplay issues. If your VMs are more important than gaming performance by all means prioritize your SSD space in that way.

Most people building specifically gaming PCs are focused on having the best possible gaming performance.

Simple solution is to buy a second SSD and install the games there. I recently picked up another 512GB on started moving steam games over.

I still have a spinning disk but it is just raw storage / backups

 

[Ketchup]

Simple solution is to buy a second SSD and install the games there. I recently picked up another 512GB on started moving steam games over.

I still have a spinning disk but it is just raw storage / backups

The pricing of these things is definitely helping us go in this direction. Why waste a good OS drive when you can get add another SSD for a fraction of the cost they used to be, and have even more apps with the increased performance level. Wouldn't be surprised if I do this in another year or two.

 

[vailr]

There was a 960 Gb SSD on sale at Amazon for $199 last week.
Also: the free program "AOMEI Partition Assistant" that should be able to easily transfer a working install of Windows from one physical drive to another:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/aomei_partition_assistant.html