Adding SSD boot drive to desktop keeping old HD in place

[Steve Williams]

Hi, I want to add a 240 GB Crucial SSD to my desktop and rather than clone my existing drive I'm going to do a clean install of Windows 10 and bit by bit reinstall my old software. That's straightforward, but then I want to leave my old HD in place as is with Windows still on it and yet use that drive for data.
To me the benefits are -
1. A really clean install with loads of room on left on the new SSD
2. All my existing data doesn't need to be migrated to the SSD.
3. If the SSD fails I have my original HD in place to boot from together with any new data I've written to it.

Sounds great on paper, but I'm sure that there must be a downside.
So, is this actually feasible as I've not come across it as a means to install and SSD, and if so what do I need to watch out for.
Any advice, gratefully received.

 

[MrEd]

Hi Steve.
I did a similar thing several years ago.
I cloned my HDD onto a SSD, the SSD becoming my boot or C drive. The HDD, with all its stuff still on it, became my E (or whatever) drive.
After everything was working ok I then did a clean install of W10 on the SSD. With W10 you can also do a Reset (wipe all files option) which is basically the same thing and easier to perform without the need for an ISO.

 

[Steve Williams]

Hi Steve.
I did a similar thing several years ago.
I cloned my HDD onto a SSD, the SSD becoming my boot or C drive. The HDD, with all its stuff still on it, became my E (or whatever) drive.
After everything was working ok I then did a clean install of W10 on the SSD. With W10 you can also do a Reset (wipe all files option) which is basically the same thing and easier to perform without the need for an ISO.

Thanks MrEd. Sort of guessed it would be OK ish. Posted the question and then went ahead anyway - always been an impatient b*gger. Anyway, at the moment whenever I boot, I get the option to boot from two windows installations, and if I pick the SSD I can see my old HD but cannot access my old user data. 'Have permanent access' does not work so I'm currently looking at granting permissions to Everyone on my old user account to see if that works. The long and the short of it is that I need to copy all my data off the old HD, format it, and then copy the data back if I want to use it as data storage. Which means its not a boot disk and therefore not disaster recovery for the SSD. I WILL not give up though.
Thanks for your reply.

 

[MrEd]

Goodonya Steve.
When you’re done and dusted it helps to mark this thread as Solved.

 

[Saltgrass]

You don't give any info as to your system configuration. If you do a clean install with an older drive installed, hard to tell where it will put the boot files. If you may someday need to remove the old drive, you need the boot files on both drives or on the new one.

You can tell by using Disk Management and seeing where the System partition is when you are booted into each install. I am not really sure what the Licensing situation might be running two Windows installs.