Copy & paste thought exercise

[Recklesssquirel]

Not sure where to put this, so I'll just put it here and delete if need be.

OS: windows 10

Old drive used to be C drive and has 300GB of data, programs, etc. Old drive is now showing up as D drive, or whatever you please.

 

New drive is now C drive with a clean install of windows and same capacity of old drive.

 

What would/could happen if I attempted to copy all of the old drive and paste it into the new C drive?

[Crunchy Dragon]

It depends on the data.

 

Some things will be just fine and Windows will sort itself out, others might throw fits because NTFS reconfigured them to be installed in and run from D:\, not C:\.

[Kilrah]

If you copy your documents etc it'll be fine, if you try to copy the entire drive... likely it'll break, and if your goal is for the new drive to replicate the old it's drive cloning software you're after.

 

As usual it's always best to state what you actually want to achieve.

[manikyath]

copying over *specific things* cant rreally break much, but just blindly doing stuff like copy and replace'ing c:\users *will* brick your windows install immediately.

[Whatisthis]

It’s kind of like you threw out the old mattress and bought a new one, but now you’re looking to stack the old one back on top…

 

Install programs from scratch. Pure data files can be copied over no problem.