Best way to move stuff from one hhd to another?

[Crunken]

Title basically says it all, but to be more specific, i want to move over 1tb ish of games, photos and videos from my old HDD to my new one, what would be the easiest way to do this? i saw some people recommending Clonezilla but wanted to check here first to see what the best thing to do is

[Viper9]

Do you have an OS installed on the hard drive or it's only data? 

[Crunken]

Just now, Viper9 said:

Do you have an OS installed on the hard drive or it's only data? 

Only data, but games are installed there

[Viper9]

1 minute ago, Crunken said:

Only data, but games are installed there

Plug both hard drives into your PC and simply transfert files. It might take a while, but it's faster if you use the SATA interface then USB. 

[Crunken]

1 minute ago, Viper9 said:

Plug both hard drives into your PC and simply transfert files. It might take a while, but it's faster if you use the SATA interface then USB. 

what about installed games? it's a bit annoying having to go through and installing them, even if i don't have to re-download them, do you know if there's a way so windows just thinks it's my old drive but i has 4x the storage?

[Viper9]

1 minute ago, Crunken said:

what about installed games? it's a bit annoying having to go through and installing them, even if i don't have to re-download them, do you know if there's a way so windows just thinks it's my old drive but i has 4x the storage?

Usually it's pretty easy you just need to tell Steam for example the new path to your game library. 

 

But if you really want it plug and play you could clone the drive using Macrium: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

[Stu_Bear]

xcopy 

[Crunken]

9 minutes ago, Viper9 said:

Usually it's pretty easy you just need to tell Steam for example the new path to your game library. 

 

But if you really want it plug and play you could clone the drive using Macrium: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

Yeah i saw that steam has made it easy, i'm just not sure about origin, battle.net or uplay xd

[Kisai]

28 minutes ago, Crunken said:

Title basically says it all, but to be more specific, i want to move over 1tb ish of games, photos and videos from my old HDD to my new one, what would be the easiest way to do this? i saw some people recommending Clonezilla but wanted to check here first to see what the best thing to do is

If you are intending on replacing the drive, use robocopy with the /MIR parameter and copy the entire file system from one to the other, than remove the original drive and remount the new drive as the same drive letter. All will be fine.

 

If you intend to keep using the previous drive, you will not be able to use "installed to" software without that drive replacing it in the drive letter mounts. You can however make use of features in Steam to move the "Steam Library" but that should only be looked at if you're intending to use both drives.

[Crunken]

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

If you are intending on replacing the drive, use robocopy with the /MIR parameter and copy the entire file system from one to the other, than remove the original drive and remount the new drive as the same drive letter. All will be fine.

 

If you intend to keep using the previous drive, you will not be able to use "installed to" software without that drive replacing it in the drive letter mounts. You can however make use of features in Steam to move the "Steam Library" but that should only be looked at if you're intending to use both drives.

Yeah i'm replacing the drive, google'd a bit but not 100% sure how robocopy works?

[SpookyCitrus]

You could use cloning software like Macrium Reflect or Aomei Partition assistant. They'll do an exact copy of the drive, you should be able to clone it, hook up the new drive and go without issue, no need to assign the new drive and fiddle with the games on it to get them to work. If it's cloned it should just work.

[sub68]

I would have two usb to sata adaptors and just copy one drive to other but if you dont have any I know some that are 10 bucks.

[Crunken]

16 minutes ago, sub68 said:

I would have two usb to sata adaptors and just copy one drive to other but if you dont have any I know some that are 10 bucks.

Yeah i have some spare that came with my motherboard, but moving game installs is a bit annoying if i just copy them over normally via windows

[Kisai]

robocopy <Source> <Destination> /MIR /zb /r:1 /w:1 /xj /mt:16

Make absolutely sure you get the source and destination correct or you will erase the drive instead. zb makes it try to copy the file, r makes it retry only once instead of forever, and w makes it wait 1 second before retrying. /xj is to make it not get stuck in an infinite loop if you are copying files that might have junctions. Like if you're copying from the User profile directory. The MT is how many threads to use, default is 8. 

 

The benefit of this is that if the drive gets disconnected, you can just repeat it and it will pick up where it left off, so if it takes 7 hours to copy and someone unplugs it, you can just plug it back in and continue.

Robocopy is basically the same idea as rsync in that regard. If you don't feel comfortable using /MIR, then do /e instead

 

Most other disk copy options like dd, or drive mirroring software is slower because it's doing a sector-by-sector copy process, so it will take several hours. So you only do that if you are copying the C drive.

[sub68]

1 hour ago, Crunken said:

Yeah i have some spare that came with my motherboard, but moving game installs is a bit annoying if i just copy them over normally via windows

Ok I did not know that 

[Robchil]

both origins and uplay have find installed games option available, so you can move them where you want and then connect it to uplay/origins, i assume the others have the same option. 

[Crunken]

On 2/18/2020 at 7:43 PM, Viper9 said:

Plug both hard drives into your PC and simply transfert files. It might take a while, but it's faster if you use the SATA interface then USB. 

Yeah i just did this, it only took about 40 min to move everything over and it's working great now, thanks for the help everyone