Rebuilding hard drive content

[Craig234]

I recently had a shop destroy my OS, and I re-installed Windows 10.

There are two drives, an SSD for the OS, and a hard drive with 1.5tb of programs. The previous data on the SSD was moved by the OS into a "windows.old" subdirectory where it's there but programs unusable.

Because the OS is 'new', it's like an entirely new environment except for the existing data.

I wanted to mention how I'm planning to approach this to see if there are any suggestions to improve it.

Basically, it seems to me that I'll just need to go through the SSD and copy off any text/data files I want to save onto a USB drive, and then reformat the SSD to totally wipe it and re-install the OS.

Then, re-install all the software I noted was on it.

For the hard drive, similarly it'll be noting all the programs I have on it (hundreds, mostly games) and then formatting it and re-installing everything I want on it.

Unless there's some way to do something like restore the registry from the windows.old backup so the programs are usable, I don't know of a better approach.

This seems like a tedious, weeks-long gradual process.

Any ideas?

 

[Elixer]

That should work.
For games, if it is steam / origin / uplay, you can just copy over everything as is, and then you point those to the new location, and you won't have to download them all again.

Don't reformat the SSD though, you want to secure erase it, then format it.

 

[Craig234]

That should work.
For games, if it is steam / origin / uplay, you can just copy over everything as is, and then you point those to the new location, and you won't have to download them all again.

I'm not quite sure what you mean. For the steam games, they're unchanged on the hard drive, so no copying - the issue is the OS doesn't know about them.

Don't reformat the SSD though, you want to secure erase it, then format it.

Why is that?

 

[Ketchup]

You install Steam and tell it where the steam folder is. Steam will tell the OS where the games are.

 

[Craig234]

You install Steam and tell it where the steam folder is. Steam will tell the OS where the games are.

Sounds like that might work for Steam - but then there are a lot of other games. I guess I'd be looking at re-installing them and removing or overwriting the previous install.

 

[Ketchup]

If the game didn't came from Steam, or a similar type of platform, you can just install and have it overwrite, or just create a link to the executable, as some games have no problem playing that way.