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My first SSD questions

tornadog

Golden Member
Finally put some money down for a Samsung 830 128GB. I want to use it as the boot device. How do I make sure the bootfiles are written to the SSD, and not my existing hard drives. Right now I have a Seagate 1.5TB, Maxtor 250GB and Hitachi 250GB. My system drive is on the Seagate but my primary boot device is the Maxtor. I dont know why it happened that way, but thats how it is.

If I unplug all the HDDs and install Windows to the SSD, will there be a problem when I reconnect my HDDs later, seeing that there are bootfiles in 2 locations now? I dont want to format the HDDs, since there is bunch of data on it that I dont have space to copy to.
 
As above.

Disconnect all the drives apart from your SSD. Install Windows and all that jazz. Reconnect the other drives and go into BIOS or UEFI and make sure your boot order only has your SSD (unless you want other things there) listed and you will be fine.
 
I agree with the above. When I got my SSD, I disconnected all other drives and installed windows on the SSD.

It's pretty cool, I can boot up the fresh new windows by telling my BIOS to use the SSD as the first disk, and I can boot up the old version of windows just by selecting my old drive as the first disk. So if I need to use an old program I can quickly reboot into the old installation, without needing to open the computer or go through the hassle of reinstalling the program (because I use it so rarely).
 
I agree with the above. When I got my SSD, I disconnected all other drives and installed windows on the SSD.

It's pretty cool, I can boot up the fresh new windows by telling my BIOS to use the SSD as the first disk, and I can boot up the old version of windows just by selecting my old drive as the first disk. So if I need to use an old program I can quickly reboot into the old installation, without needing to open the computer or go through the hassle of reinstalling the program (because I use it so rarely).

You might want to think about turning that old instance into a VM. Most VM software vendors have tools to convert a running PC instance to a VM. Then you get that old crud off your disk, archive it out, etc.
 
Presumably you could image the old install with Acronis or Ghost, download a free VM such as VirtualBox, boot the recovery media from VirtualBox and restore the image?

Another benefit to this is it's how things will have to be going forward. If you already use a UEFI/GPT system (not UEFI installing in MBR mode) then you cannot simply swap between boot entries and boot whichever disk you like. You have to repair the BCD (IIRC) each time you change.
 
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