Old drive, new PC

[Lukdtx]

Hello i built a new pc recently, i was wondering if its possible to have my old desktop migrated to a new drive,
feels strange not to have everything as it used to be and i cant find stuff through file explorer.
I heard u could do that with a hard drive merger or something, would that help? Any other tips? thanks in advance

[OddOod]

I *always* recommend reinstalling. 
Old drive has hold install with all your stuff where you're used to, but it also has all the gunk it's accumulated over the years including microcode patches etc that were specific to the old hardware. Even if you do get all the patches etc. for the new hardware, the old stuff can cause problems. And it'd be a monumental task to root out every file, registry change, and DLL modification that went into those. All that gunk can easily cause problems.
I cannot count the number of times where someone comes to this forum with weird issues and the root cause ended up being that they transferred their old install. It *can* work fine. Sometimes the drive cloner works perfectly. Sometimes the old stuff doesn't break anything. But it's not worth the headache
Easiest thing to do is get a new drive, do a clean install, then migrate what data you need, and install all the applications fresh. 

[Tan3l6]

Most people recommend clean install. I've personally cloned my main OS drive for a few SSD upgrades, usually it's usable on new hardware, last time I had to make a "repair install" of 11 to get all bugs out.

Cloning is easy, but might have some minor bugs.

[Lukdtx]

8 minutes ago, OddOod said:

I *always* recommend reinstalling. 
Old drive has hold install with all your stuff where you're used to, but it also has all the gunk it's accumulated over the years including microcode patches etc that were specific to the old hardware. Even if you do get all the patches etc. for the new hardware, the old stuff can cause problems. And it'd be a monumental task to root out every file, registry change, and DLL modification that went into those. All that gunk can easily cause problems.
I cannot count the number of times where someone comes to this forum with weird issues and the root cause ended up being that they transferred their old install. It *can* work fine. Sometimes the drive cloner works perfectly. Sometimes the old stuff doesn't break anything. But it's not worth the headache
Easiest thing to do is get a new drive, do a clean install, then migrate what data you need, and install all the applications fresh. 

forgot to specify that i did a clean install already but it felt foreign not to have old stuff on then i took the old drive out and installed it but realized that its all cluttery and messed up, plus its an old hard drive and it makes unnecessary loud noise too, so i thought i could copy the files or something, sorry for the confusion
also this might be unrelated but ive had this weird issue with the pc even checking bios and drives it would crash and restart randomly probably something else though

[Egon3]

1 hour ago, Lukdtx said:

forgot to specify that i did a clean install already but it felt foreign not to have old stuff on then i took the old drive out and installed it but realized that its all cluttery and messed up, plus its an old hard drive and it makes unnecessary loud noise too, so i thought i could copy the files or something, sorry for the confusion
also this might be unrelated but ive had this weird issue with the pc even checking bios and drives it would crash and restart randomly probably something else though

What you're looking to do at this stage will be a somewhat manual process unfortunately. If you have both drives in the PC, then you should see both drives in This PC in the file browser. Your new drive is most likely the C: drive and the other "old drive" may be identified as a D: or E: drive.

 

Most of the files you are looking for are most likely located in your user directory, which may be at D:\Users\username for example. Within there you will see your desktop folder, documents, photos, videos, etc.

 

I'd suggest copying the files you want to the equivalent directories in your new drive (C:\Users\Username for example). Maybe take note of what is where and organize along the way. Understanding your file structure and where everything is located will help greatly when you have to do this again in the future 

[OddOod]

On 5/16/2025 at 1:33 PM, Lukdtx said:

loud noise

Wait, it makes noise? Is it a hard drive?

On 5/16/2025 at 1:33 PM, Lukdtx said:

i thought i could copy the files

Files are easy to copy, but these days when a program gets installed it does a bunch of stuff in addition to putting files in places so just moving the files won't be enough in most cases