After cloning Windows... it should just work right?

[insyght]

Soo,

I am cloning my installation of Windows 10 in its current state to a new SSD I ordered.

I have already set up the Windows Media Creation Tool and the Backup of my System on an external hard drive.

 

What I am wondering is, when I boot from the new SSD after cloning, it will just recognize all my other HDDs I had, and read out the data normally, right?

 

Right now, I have 3 HDDs set up, one with games, one with general data and one with recording and editing files.

I would hate for something like Steam not recognizing its own libraries on my HDDs, or something of that sort.

 

I generally have no problem with a clean Windows install, but it would suck to clone and/or reinstall nearly 2TB of data.

 

[Donut417]

9 minutes ago, insyght said:

I would hate for something like Steam not recognizing its own libraries on my HDDs, or something of that sort

Even if it doesn't recognize the steam library on the other drive. You can set libraries in steam. Thats how I always did it with reinstall Windows. Just put my games on a secondary disk. Then when I installed steam I would just tell it where my games were, and it generally always finds them. 

 

11 minutes ago, insyght said:

I generally have no problem with a clean Windows install, but it would suck to clone and/or reinstall nearly 2TB of data.

 

For the record, Reinstalling Windows does not effect data on other drives. Actually its best that you unplug all other drives in the system, when installing Windows. Windows does this STUPID thing where it puts boot files on other disks. So you make sure it has no access to other disks during reinstallation. 

[insyght]

53 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Even if it doesn't recognize the steam library on the other drive. You can set libraries in steam. Thats how I always did it with reinstall Windows. Just put my games on a secondary disk. Then when I installed steam I would just tell it where my games were, and it generally always finds them.

Hm. Steam just used to tell me that I "couldn't add steam libraries that aren't empty". At least that was a problem when I last reinstalled my windows without cloning.

54 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

For the record, Reinstalling Windows does not effect data on other drives. Actually its best that you unplug all other drives in the system, when installing Windows. Windows does this STUPID thing where it puts boot files on other disks. So you make sure it has no access to other disks during reinstallation. 

Yea, learned that the hard way. Fucked up one of my drives with some windows boot files and everytime I booted up my PC it kept asking "which install of Windows" I would like to start. One just kept bootlooping, the other was fine. It was annoying none-the-less.

 

I was just worried about a fresh windows not reading my other drives properly, forcing me to re-partition them somehow - or even worse, format them..

 

I will try the cloning process first.

 

Thanks for the reassurance! @Donut417

[Mark Kaine]

Some things I noticed. 

 

If you clone the windows drive you do not need the media creation tool at all. 

 

 

And it's also not a new / fresh install. 

 

The cloning software just copies everything over 'as is'. 

 

And yes it does (just) work. 

 

PS: Also I did this many times, my steam files were completely unaffected, steam has no way to know its a cloned drive, it'll just behave as the old drive did. 

 

 

[Jarsky]

Personally I haven't done a "fresh" install of Windows since Windows 8 back in 2012 on my Gaming PC. 

I've just constantly done in-place upgrades and cloned to new SSD's. I'm now 3 generations of hardware in, with 4 generations of GPU without the need to fresh install Windows...it's just an unnecessary headache these days to reconfigure everything. 

 

I typically have just used Clonezilla personally. And unplug any additional disks during the clone and first boot process. 

After the first boot, also check "Disk Management" to make sure that your partitions are all ok. 

Off memory I think I used EaseUS to fix my partition layout, then unplug the old SSD to make sure everything is running fine without it.  

I typically keep my old SSD in its original state for about a month before deleting it and reusing/selling it.