Question: Hello,
I’ve brought a Samsung 970 Evo 1TB SSD recently for gaming. I plan to move my OS (Windows 10) to it, however, I don’t want to lose all my HDD files and apps. Is there any way I can move just the OS to my SSD? I don’t want to clone all of my HDD files over to my SSD as my HDD is around 1.6tbs in size and my SSD is only 1tb in size.
I’ve already put Windows 10 installation files onto a USB using the media creation tool in the event that’s needed, and I was originally planning to just reinstall Windows onto the SSD and then delete Windows on the HDD, but now I worry I’ll lose everything on my HDD if I do that.
Answer:
Well, is there a way I can reinstall the OS onto the SSD w/o losing any files? I read somewhere I could use a USB with the W10 installation media on it to install W10 onto the SSD, set the SSD as the boot drive and then keep all of the stuff on my HDD.
Yes, but….
Applications on the HDD will not be usable with the new OS on the 970.
Games like via Steam/Origin will probably be OK. You just have to tell the new Steam client where they live on the HDD.
Personal files like Doc/Video/etc are accessible, but a bit of a pain if they are in the Library folders. Those folders carry the permissions of the original user. If at all possible, copy those files out to somewhere other than the default Library folders. Then, accessing those is no problem.
And after installing the OS on the 970, you really really need to remove the whole Windows thing from the HDD> You don’t want 2x bootable OSs in this system.