Contents of two hard drives onto a single hard drive?

[Mark Kaine]

Can i just copy both drives content onto two partitions and call them say F: and E: and then swap the drives in order to windows still recognize the content properly (games,  programs,  links, etc)?

 

 

I gotta say i absolutely hate how windows doesn't find stuff if you change hard drives or even just a drive letter lol... i know that's "how it's designed" but what the hell this has got to be the most inconvenient and illogical stuff ever ...

 

 

3 trillion operations per nano second but cannot find  or recognize a file because a letter changed, give me a break! 

 

 

serious question,  will it work?

[manikyath]

windows file system is based entirely on the drive letter and path behind it. you can change all the drive layout and partitions you want, as long as F:\games is back to F:\games at the end of it, it'll be happy.

 

it's sort of like how linux finds your user profile in /home, but beyond that has no real context of where /home is on your drive layout. you can migrate the folder to a new disk, fix the mount point, and it's happy.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

windows file system is based entirely on the drive letter and path behind it. you can change all the drive layout and partitions you want, as long as F:\games is back to F:\games at the end of it, it'll be happy.

yeah, i know that of course, i just wasn't sure if it would work with two partitions on one drive... and also how to actually achieve this - can i just plug the new drive as external first to make the two partitions and copy the old drives contents over and then swap the drives?  

 

or should i install the new drive first, make the partitions and then copy everything over?  

just asking because i literally can't physically fit all drives internally.

 

 

As for my rambling about how windows works, yeah, sure, but the thing is i recently moved an entire program to another drive and to my surprise the shortcut automatically found it even though drive letter and physical disc drive obviously changed and i thought why cant it always be like that! 

 

 

[manikyath]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

yeah, i know that of course, i just wasn't sure if it would work with two partitions on one drive... and also how to actually achieve this - can i just plug the new drive as external first to make the two partitions and copy the old drives contents over and then swap the drives?  

 

or should i install the new drive first, make the partitions and then copy everything over?  

just asking because i literally can't physically fit all drives internally.

 

 

As for my rambling about how windows works, yeah, sure, but the thing is i recently moved an entire program to another drive and to my surprise the shortcut automatically found it even though drive letter and physical disc drive obviously changed and i thought why cant it always be like that! 

 

 

windows doesnt care about what's behind the drive letter, as long as the drive letter is right, it could be anything you want behind it. i've even seen workarounds for exceptionally dense business software that abused network drive mapping to map folders as drive letters, and it just works.

 

it's essentially a matter of partitioning stuff how you want, put the new drives on temporary drive letters, copy stuff over, swap the disks, and then change the drive letters to be what windows wants them to be. to make sure you dont confuse yourself, name your drives with the drive letters they should be (for example "old D, old E, new D, new E"

 

the only drive you cant do this with is the C drive, but for that it's as easy as "the C drive is whatever partition windows booted from". so if you want to replace that (make sure to bring your bootloader along with you) and windows wont even notice you moved drive. not recommended to do that manually though...