Upgrading storage HDD - Alternative Options to Cloning?

[Mitchell77]

I have a 120gb ssd with windows and a few programs installed on it, but right now most of my stuff is on a 2gb storage HDD. Since I've been wanting more space for a while and the HDD is pretty old (5+ years) I decided to buy a 4gb WD Black to replace it. I just spent all day trying to clone my 2gb HDD to the new 4gb one using macrium reflect, but after struggling with errors due to bad sectors & waiting ~4 hours for "chkdsk /r", which didn't seem to fix anything (got stuck on 13% for hours, then suddenly started scanning the new HDD & finished within less than a minute before booting into windows normally), I'm starting to consider my alternatives. Aside from cloning my storage drive or starting fresh/redownloading everything, what other options do I have if I want to retain most of/all of my data when upgrading? 

Potentially dumb question, but: could I manually drag everything from my current HDD to the new one without issues? As in would software installations, etc. be affected?

Btw, although according to the errors in macrium reflect my HDD has bad sectors, I haven't noticed any signs of corruption myself.

Thanks in advance for the help!

[Catsrules]

11 minutes ago, Mitchell77 said:

I have a 120gb ssd with windows and a few programs installed on it, but right now most of my stuff is on a 2gb storage HDD. Since I've been wanting more space for a while and the HDD is pretty old (5+ years) I decided to buy a 4gb WD Black to replace it. I just spent all day trying to clone my 2gb HDD to the new 4gb one using macrium reflect, but after struggling with errors due to bad sectors & waiting ~4 hours for "chkdsk /r", which didn't seem to fix anything (got stuck on 13% for hours, then suddenly started scanning the new HDD & finished within less than a minute before booting into windows normally), I'm starting to consider my alternatives. Aside from cloning my storage drive or starting fresh/redownloading everything, what other options do I have if I want to retain most of/all of my data when upgrading? 

Potentially dumb question, but: could I manually drag everything from my current HDD to the new one without issues? As in would software installations, etc. be affected?

Btw, although according to the errors in macrium reflect my HDD has bad sectors, I haven't noticed any signs of corruption myself.

Thanks in advance for the help!

As long as it isn't the OS drive, and it is just program installers you should be able to just drag and drop the files over to the new drive and be fine. If your getting disk IO errors my guess some of the files will error out and not copy over, if your lucky it will hopefully just be a file you can download or install again and not have to worry about it. For example like a steam game, just have steam verify the game files and it will re download the missing files.  

 

However one important thing you need to do afterwards is change the drive letter of the new drive to be the same as the old one. So all of the software file paths will stay the same. You can do this in disk management.

 

[Mitchell77]

6 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

As long as it isn't the OS drive, and it is just program installers you should be able to just drag and drop the files over to the new drive and be fine. If your getting disk IO errors my guess some of the files will error out and not copy over, if your lucky it will hopefully just be a file you can download or install again and not have to worry about it. For example like a steam game, just have steam verify the game files and it will re download the missing files.  

 

However one important thing you need to do afterwards is change the drive letter of the new drive to be the same as the old one. So all of the software file paths will stay the same. You can do this in disk management.

 

Thanks. Thought that might work but didn't want to waste hours waiting for all the files to move over just to have it fail lol. Hopefully it works, getting tired of troubleshooting 

[Catsrules]

Just now, Mitchell77 said:

Thanks. Thought that might work but didn't want to waste hours waiting for all the files to move over just to have it fail lol. Hopefully it works, getting tired of troubleshooting 

Yeah hard drive problems are the worst because it takes forever to troubleshoot.

[Enderman]

Windows and programs need to be reinstalled.

Files like music, pictures, documents, etc. can be copy pasted through file explorer when both drives are plugged in.

[Catsrules]

2 hours ago, Enderman said:

Windows and programs need to be reinstalled.

Files like music, pictures, documents, etc. can be copy pasted through file explorer when both drives are plugged in.

From my understanding we are just talking about migrating a secondary hard drive to a new drive we are not touching the main OS drive. In this case you can just do a standard file copy from one drive to the other even with program files. The only catch is you need to change the the drive letter on the new drive to what the old drive was so the program file paths remain the same.

 

 

[Mitchell77]

Thanks for the advice guys! Finally got everything copied over & it works! Start menu shortcuts were messed up for a while but all i had to do was edit the file path (changed it to the exact same thing and hit apply) for each one & they fixed. Was worried I might have more registry-related issues from copy-pasting program files, etc. but it appears to be working fine so far.