'Swapping' hard drives

B2K2016 · Mar 28, 2017

I purchased an asus laptop about a year ago for uni, It came with a second internal hard drive installed.
My problem is that the c drive has about 28gb memory. With windows, microsoft office and antivirus installed I basically have no space left. There are other programs I need for my study but in order to use them I literally have to delete things and reinstall.
My question is..is there a way to 'swap' the hard drives around (without opening up the laptop)? My d drive is 500gb that I basically don't use-there's about 1gb of photos in it. Or another solution, that isn't too complicated? I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to those things but have some knowledge.
Cheers

hang-the-9 · Mar 28, 2017

No you can't just swap the hard drives, the second drive does not have Windows installed and won't boot. If you want to swap them you need to use a cloning program like clonezilla to clone one drive to the other which will copy the full disk to the second disk.

You may want to get a new solid state drive, then clone the boot drive to that.

B2K2016 · Mar 28, 2017

thanks for your reply. I have installed windows on the second drive, I had a very little play around with it but didn't want to cause problems venturing into things I didn't know too much about lol. I now have the option of which windows to open when booting. I was hoping it would be as easy as uninstalling the original windows but probably not? Or am I able to (as you said) just clone the drive to the second..if so would there be any other steps I'd need to take for it to work properly, if it would.
Sorry it's probably frustrating when people who don't know enough want to tamper with computers! It's just driving me insane not having enough space to use it with 500gb just sitting there.

Hamperking68 · Mar 29, 2017

It's the point of these forums! Don't feel bad, it's something we like to do.

Remove the windows files and the entire windows folder on the old OS.

That should prevent it from even giving you the option to boot into it.

robert600 · Mar 29, 2017

Hi,

In your 1st post you mention having office and an antivirus program (in addition to windows).

OK, now you have another copy of Windows on your 2nd drive. I think you will find that when you boot from that 2nd drive - you will not have access to either office or the antivirus program. you will have reinstall them to that copy of windows (hopefully you have the installation disks or whatever).

Not to open a can of worms or confuse things entirely but .... your original version of windows (on the small drive) will load programs which are located on the 2nd drive and it's not too difficult to tell programs like office to save its files etc onto the second drive. what I'm trying to say is - you could just leave the small drive as your windows 'boot' drive and have everything else (programs, data, everything) on the 2nd drive. You'd never notice the smallness of your boot drive cause you wouldn't be putting anything on it. It would be a bit of fiddling about though so ... maybe the way you are going about it is better?

B2K2016 · Mar 29, 2017

At the moment I literally only have windows installed on both drives..no antivirus etc (I'm typing this on a borrowed laptop)
Now I'd tried something like that but didn't have a lot of luck. I get office free as a student and download it online so installation disc isn't an issue but when I installed it I wasn't given an option for which drive..it just went straight to the main drive. I also tried to install IBM SSPS on my second drive and it worked but not very well..it installed a million files and I had to go through them and figure out which one would open the program lol. If having windows on the second drive doesn't work out I may give it another go though, perhaps I missed something.

B2K2016 · Mar 30, 2017

ok, so I've successfully moved windows to my larger hard drive! Am a little concerned as it seemed too easy to do lol. Everything appears to be working fine but my last question is about partitions. My original drive has 3 partitions (EFI system/Wim boot, primary/ Recovery) and my larger hard drive has one (Boot, page file, crash dump, primary). Again, i don't know a lot about partitions etc am learning as I go!
I'm under the impression it'd be wise to partition the drive that now has windows on it? I can reinstall if needs be. And perhaps remove the partitions on the original drive? I have a rough idea how to do it but worried about tampering with only a little understanding

Hamperking68 · Mar 30, 2017

B2K2016 :

Yes, you should have the same partitions.

You can remove all the old ones by deleting them in disk management then extending the original volume.

B2K2016 · Mar 30, 2017

so I've partitioned the new hard drive but how do I designate the same files as before ie one of the partitions was a recovery, one system etc?

Hamperking68 · Mar 30, 2017

Afaik it creates them Automatically.

Check in disk management and see if the partitions are there.

B2K2016 · Mar 31, 2017

I kinda have it sorted now lol. I had to create the partitions myself, ran defrag etc and everything seems to be where it should be and is working well. Did shoot myself in the foot though and didn't make one of the partitions big enough so may find myself in the same situation again soon lacking space but I now know how to fix it and will when I have some time to.
Thanks a lot for the help!

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