Boot Drive Question

[SpegMachina]

So I have a few questions/concerns.

 

1) I boot off of a WD Black 1TB. All of my data is on 1 partition, including Windows. I was curious if there are any potential risks of only having 1 primary partition that has W10 and all of my files on it. How can I make sure that all of my data is backed up and what are the risks of having my OS on the same partition as everything else?

 

2) Can I go back and partition off my OS without doing a clean install?

 

3) I would like to know how I could get my OS from my HDD over to an SSD to boot off of that instead.

 

Appreciate any answers!

 

[KaasKop]

1) Well it's safer to have two partitions, because if you ever need to reinstall windows it won't write over your files and stuff then.
And I believe in Windows 10 you can symlink libraries to the other partition so everything goes there automagically.

 

2) What? Do you mean partitioning your now installation of Windows? I wouldn't recommend that and i dont think Windows allows that in their disk manager. Windows also puts the boot files at the end of the partition so if you shrink the partition you'll overwrite the boot files, thus you can't boot.

 

3) You can always use Clonezilla and clone the HDD to an SSD, but the best way is to fully reinstall Windows.

 

I do hope this information is still accurate in Windows 10. haven't used it.

[SpegMachina]

9 minutes ago, KaasKop said:

1) Well it's safer to have two partitions, because if you ever need to reinstall windows it won't write over your files and stuff then.
And I believe in Windows 10 you can symlink libraries to the other partition so everything goes there automagically.

 

2) What? Do you mean partitioning your now installation of Windows? I wouldn't recommend that and i dont think Windows allows that in their disk manager. Windows also puts the boot files at the end of the partition so if you shrink the partition you'll overwrite the boot files, thus you can't boot.

 

3) You can always use Clonezilla and clone the HDD to an SSD, but the best way is to fully reinstall Windows.

 

I do hope this information is still accurate in Windows 10. haven't used it.

Can you explain symlink to me?

[SydneySideSteveSomewheres]

You should have a back-up of the drive, this is what you will use when the inevitable data crash happens (not that I wish that on you or anything!). Some people suggest that if you really need the data there should be three separate copies in three different locations.

Having a large drive as the main Operating System drive whilst is good for availability of local storage, presents a problem when you need to make an image of the data. As this requires you to have several storage options of the same or greater capacity just to store the required redundancy files e.g. weekly backups for six weeks then overwrite the oldest etc.

1) Windows 10 seems to use a single partition when a standard upgrade path was/is taken. Windows 7 as an example has a minimum of two partitions, a Master Boot Record (MBR) and the Operating System (OS). Do not store your backups on the same main drive you use for everything else! This does not make sense to do as IF the drive gets corrupted the whole drive is bendixed and you lose everything.

2) No, not easily although this can be done using another system running for example Ubuntu, but can corrupt the MBR.

3) You will need a second drive that is free of data and preferably new (use this for the backups you will be making however often you think you should back stuff up weekly/monthly/by-monthly). I would use Acronis bootable media and create a *.tib image of the drive with Windows OS that you are moving to the SSD. Then remove the old drive and put the new SSD into the same slot on the motherboard and boot from Acronis bootable media, which will then help you "recover" your data using from that *.tib image. This is not a tutorial of how to use Acronis True Image (they do offer free to use trail software) for that you can watch Linus below..

Hope this helps

[KaasKop]

2 minutes ago, corbindotgif said:

Can you explain symlink to me?

Sure, In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is the nickname for any file that contains a reference to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or relative path and that affects pathname resolution.[1] (from Wikipedia)

And if it hasn't changed in Windows 10, in the left pane of "Explorer" you should see all your shortcuts like Documents, Pictures etc... right click on one of the libraries>go to the "Location" tab (I believe it's called) and there you can set the location of your Documents and where Windows will store them.Here's a complete tutorial (Don't do the appdata thing)

[Griffscavern]

2 hours ago, SydneySideSteveSomewheres said:

Snip

 

 

Sydney the dates for Lincoln's life in your signature are wrong.

Should be:

 

 

Abraham Lincoln,1808-1865

 

 

[SydneySideSteveSomewheres]

2 minutes ago, Griffscavern said:

Sydney the dates for Lincoln's life in your signature are wrong.

Should be:

 

 

Abraham Lincoln,1808-1865

 

 

Thanks @Griffscavern adjusted the typo.

[Griffscavern]

6 minutes ago, SydneySideSteveSomewheres said:

Thanks @Griffscavern adjusted the typo.

Anytime. I knew he wasn't around when I was born in 1964. ;p

[SpegMachina]

15 hours ago, SydneySideSteveSomewheres said:

You should have a back-up of the drive, this is what you will use when the inevitable data crash happens (not that I wish that on you or anything!). Some people suggest that if you really need the data there should be three separate copies in three different locations.

Having a large drive as the main Operating System drive whilst is good for availability of local storage, presents a problem when you need to make an image of the data. As this requires you to have several storage options of the same or greater capacity just to store the required redundancy files e.g. weekly backups for six weeks then overwrite the oldest etc.

1) Windows 10 seems to use a single partition when a standard upgrade path was/is taken. Windows 7 as an example has a minimum of two partitions, a Master Boot Record (MBR) and the Operating System (OS). Do not store your backups on the same main drive you use for everything else! This does not make sense to do as IF the drive gets corrupted the whole drive is bendixed and you lose everything.

2) No, not easily although this can be done using another system running for example Ubuntu, but can corrupt the MBR.

3) You will need a second drive that is free of data and preferably new (use this for the backups you will be making however often you think you should back stuff up weekly/monthly/by-monthly). I would use Acronis bootable media and create a *.tib image of the drive with Windows OS that you are moving to the SSD. Then remove the old drive and put the new SSD into the same slot on the motherboard and boot from Acronis bootable media, which will then help you "recover" your data using from that *.tib image. This is not a tutorial of how to use Acronis True Image (they do offer free to use trail software) for that you can watch Linus below..

Hope this helps

So what if I just reinstall Windows onto my ssd and put that first in my boot order? Will i have to reinstall all my programs onto the ssd? And what about the other version of windows on my HDD?

[SydneySideSteveSomewheres]

Whilst you have the ability to install Windows if you have the *.iso onto the SSD. You will need to reinstall all the programs as the new Windows OS will not run programs from another (conflicting) Windows installation, that is correct.

If you set the boot order in the BIOS to the SSD, that will be the OS the machine uses to interface with the world and you. The second drive will be seen as a storage device with the normal file folder structure you are used to seeing. As long as you do not try to move or modify the system files (they are usually the hidden ones) you can change the boot order back to that drive in the BIOS and the HDD will operate as the OS for the machine.

 

The problem you are going to have is one that I had similarly recently. Where I wanted to boost my OS boot times by moving from a 1Tb mechanical drive to a much smaller 240Gb SSD, luckily the data footprint on the HDD was not that large. I had only to transfer about 190Gb of data off the HDD to make the image fit onto the smaller drive, and did not have to uninstall / delete any of the 110 programs.

What I am now considering is either buying one of those 2Tb hybrid SSHD, (because my game library and steam library need to go somewhere) or alternately setting up a RAID0 with four small (120Gb) SSD's as I have a UPS.

 

The biggest issue we all seem to have, is one where the amount of storage needed is growing, continuously and that factor is not likely to change the more devices we consume!

 

You (and I) will eventually need more storage, what I suggest is that you get another large drive. Move some of your data off the 1Tb drive onto it, then create the backup image on the SSD and start to use that as the primary OS. This way you will have the same machine as before, but it will boot much, much faster. Then consider how to store you growing data footprint, if you have room in your machine you can install the HDD and start to install programs to that instead of on the SSD. They will take a bit longer to load initially but this should not effect the overall performance of even the biggest game file (although some games like Minecraft with huge maps will suffer lagging).

 

You can then use the third drive as an external incremental backup drive e.g. inside a USB enclosure, which will give you three separate backups in three different locations.

 

Hope this helps