Best way to migrate to another hard drive?

[Alterlai]

Hello everyone,

 

I have recently bought the Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM hard drive.

 

I now have:

one SSD 120GB

A 320GB Hard drive

A 1TB Ext. USB2.0 Hard drive.

 

I have all my programms / games located on my 320 internal drive. But as you might suspect, it is out of space :(.

I'm done deleting old games and eventually having to redownload them, as instead just leaving them sitting somewhere on my drive.

 

Now i'm looking for the best way to migrate all the software/games from the 320 drive to my new 2TB drive. I have read something about

programms like Arconis. I'm not sure if there is an easier way to go about this. 

 

I would like the 320 drive to be formatted so I can maybe store some recordings on there.

 

If any of you have any experience with such scenarios, please feel free to leave some tips.

[joelthezombie15]

Why cant you just copy and paste? ctrl+a then ctrl+c then to the other drive folder, ctrl+v unless im missing something that will work fine.

[sabot]

Acronis is amazing, I use it for all my machines, it backs them up and made it so easy for me to switch to ssd, they have a free migration tool. http://www.intel.com/support/go/ssdinstallation/

I have used it to migrate 5 machines(ssd-hdd and back.) with absolutely no issues, restore my younger brothers hard drive when it died. There are some issues with copying and pasting, it can cause windows to reactivate and something with the drive signature that I do not know about, but you can research if you want to find it.

[Alterlai]

Why cant you just copy and paste? ctrl+a then ctrl+c then to the other drive folder, ctrl+v unless im missing something that will work fine.

From my experience windows remembers the paths of some of the programs you install, and when you just copy paste and run the program, i think the program will look for the files in the wrong directory.

So there are probably a few programs that allow copy pasting but most don't.

[sabot]

That is true, and their is the issue with Microsoft registry and switching hard drives with out proper software i.e. copy and pasting will cause issues. It can make windows reactivate which is no fun!