Migrating to a new boot drive

[radiotura]

Today, after nearly half a year of procrastination I finally got around to installing my new Samsung 990 Pro 4TB NVMe. I currently have been using a bog standard, but faithful WD Blue m.2 SATA ssd capped at 1TB as my main boot drive. I had been dreading this day, and with good reason. Turns out my 2nd m.2 slot doesn't support SATA m.2 drives (wtf?!), only PCIe... which is not even a thing I knew was a thing. But Christ on a cracker my inner figurative boy scout had perhaps subconsciously sensed something like this might happen and I had also randomly purchased a JEYI Dual M.2 PCIE 4.0 Adapter (for NVMe / NGFF SSD, NVME (M Key) and SATA (B Key) SSD to PCIe) for less than $5 many months prior woooo... so the install was successful after several grueling hours of tinkering around my PC and its bios settings.

 

Now the fun begins -_-. But I'm also fully aware things could get real dicey as I will be making potentially irreversible actions. I successfully used Macronis to clone my main C: boot drive to the Samsung NVMe. And it seems I'm easily able to boot to it from BIOS. I obviously want to fully migrate all my booting to the new samsung NVMe drive. Right now I'm guessing a lot of the programs and everything is probably still pathing to the old C: drive when I boot to the new drive. Do I simply format over the old drive and slap a "C:" on the new one using something like MiniTool Partition Wizard to change the drive letter? That seems criminally too simple to be the solution and I'm worried about really screwing things up here, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks so much in advance.

 

Also if anyone has any advice on how to move a ton of installed games over to a new drive partition without reinstalling them all one-by-one, I would love you forever, or at least for today. It's not critical, but I crave better organization by migrating all my games to one single folder on one single partition. A task for another day, for sure, but I figured I'd ask since it's all of the same vein. Sorry for my TLDR, it's just how I write everything.

[okkee]

idk if this is exactly what you're looking for but you can clone the existing boot drive to the new ssd and then format the old drive. that way, windows and your programs will still behave as normal but just on a new drive. i used this guide when moving from a hdd to a sata ssd and had no problems. and you seem to be in a better position since the new drive is much larger than the old one. 

 

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/copy-your-windows-installation-to-an-ssd

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-clone-a-hard-drive-on-windows-pc-mac

[windozedev]

21 minutes ago, radiotura said:

Also if anyone has any advice on how to move a ton of installed games over to a new drive partition without reinstalling them all one-by-one, I would love you forever, or at least for today.

Move the games, then create a directory symbolic link to the new location.

[radiotura]

1 hour ago, okkee said:

idk if this is exactly what you're looking for but you can clone the existing boot drive to the new ssd and then format the old drive. that way, windows and your programs will still behave as normal but just on a new drive. i used this guide when moving from a hdd to a sata ssd and had no problems. and you seem to be in a better position since the new drive is much larger than the old one. 

 

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/copy-your-windows-installation-to-an-ssd

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-clone-a-hard-drive-on-windows-pc-mac

Interesting. Not sure if it is either haha. Might work if what I've proposed is no bueno. Definitely something I'll need to look further into. Thanks for the reference.

[radiotura]

1 hour ago, windozedev said:

 create a directory symbolic link to the new location.

Brother, that is the first time I have ever even heard of a "directory symbolic link". Dang I'm so out of date. I swear I used to consider myself a PC wiz, but time moves so fast.

 

Is this kinda what you're talking about?: https://www.liberiangeek.net/2023/10/how-to-create-symbolic-links-symlink-in-windows/

 

Most of the search results I found referenced linux, which is a mostly a giant blank space in my brain as a knowledge area. But if the link above is what you're talking about, it also mentions at the bottom, "Symlinks work within the same file system; they can’t link to files on different volumes." That sounds problematic to what I'm trying to accomplish. What do you think?

[windozedev]

42 minutes ago, radiotura said:

Brother, that is the first time I have ever even heard of a "directory symbolic link".

 

"Symlinks work within the same file system; they can’t link to files on different volumes."

Meant to say junction. Same thing I did when moving my steam library to another drive. Use mklink /j