I’m looking to install an SSD in my computer and will be doing a clean install of Window 8.1. Are there any useful online resources or utilities to help relocating the Windows directories (Users, Program Files etc.) to my standard harddrive?

IIRC Samsung drives come with a package to completely migrate your old drive over, might be worth checking.

Windows has a migration tool for exporting that stuff, try that?

Do you have the original windows cd ? If so you’d be better off doing a clean install I would think. On Macs there are two programmes SuperDuper and CarbinCopyCloner which would do what you want, perhaps they have Windows versions.

When installing an SSD, do you need any special connectors or a specific motherboard to handle the increased transfer speeds?

Hang on, what are you doing?

You’re fitting an SSD as your primary drive, and keeping your mechanical disk as a secondary, and want all your user directories to be on the old (now D:\) disk, is that correct?

If so, it’s as simple as right-click / properties / location on each folder inside your user directory and changing the drive letter.

If not, what are you proposing?

It used to be called Windows Easy Transfer in W7. I’m sure 8 has something similar.

I don’t think the Samsung utility lets you do anything other than clone the whole drive, having just used it this afternoon!

@andeh – no. The SSD’s run on the same stands internal hardware although there are some different standards (SATA 2 or 3 basically) which dictate which type of ssd you should buy. This does assume your computer isn’t totally ancient.

I’ve no problem cloning drives, but I currently have a Windows 8.1 desktop with a mechanical drive onto which I want to add an SDD to use as a primary drive with Windows installed on. I would then be intending to use the mechanical drive to hold the program files and certain Windows directories that don’t really need to be on the SSD (the Users directory and various storage directories).

For a long time various versions of Windows have allow you to relocate Windows directories elsewhere and onto other drives, either by editing the registry or using a utility like TweakUI.

I’m just looking for the easiest way to install Windows 8.1 on an SSD and then relocate various directories onto the mechanical drive prior to reinstalling my software (the Program Files directories need to go onto the mechanical drive).

What I said, then.

I’d leave Program Files where it is, frankly. If you really want to, just specify the new path when you install your software.

IIRC there’s some issues with moving the users data from 8.1, be very careful.

http://www.zdnet.com/dont-move-your-windows-user-profiles-folder-to-another-drive-7000022142/

Unfortunately, Microsoft begs to differ. Quite vehemently, in fact. Their advice is firm and crystal-clear: Don’t even try to relocate user profiles to another partition or disk on a production system running Windows.

Cheers jambalaya!

When I did this I had trouble deleting the old Windows system folders as they were prtotected. Ended up copying the data off and reformatting to get the space back. Other than that it’s piss easy!

The main reason for moving the folders across to the mechanical harddrive was to minimise the amount of space used on the much smaller SSD. However I’ve just had a look and I’ve currently used less that 82Gb of my 1Tb mechanical drive and that includes Windows 8.1, all my program files and all my data; since I was looking at getting a 240Gb SSD perhaps needn’t be too concerned about SSD usage.

The method I’ve used with W7 is to create a temporary administrator account when I first install. Login as that, then go into the registry and point %ProfilesDirectory% (in Vista that’s at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList – sorry don’t currently have a working W7 installation) at where you want the user directories to go, before creating the new users – they will be created in the right place. You can then delete the temporary admin, or just leave it.

I see the article about not doing this in W8.1, but wonder if this is only a problem if you change the directory at install time, so that all user directories are relocated. Using my method you can change %ProfilesDirectory% back after creating your users, which may allow updates to work correctly – given that all original system profiles are still in the standard place and updates shouldn’t need to touch your user profiles.

I did use to use an unattend script to relocate, but that doesn’t work with pre-installed windows where you just have a recovery partition, so can’t do a totally clean install. Hence the method outlined above, which to be honest I prefer anyway.

IIRC there’s some issues with moving the users data from 8.1, be very careful.

That’s moving “Users” rather than subfolders within your user folder. Which is a silly thing to do.

Silly why?