How to swap second drive

Have just got a gaming pc for son for Christmas. It comes with a 250gb ssd and a 2tb hard drive. Assume windows is on the ssd. I also have a 1tb Samsung ssd recently bought for his PS4. Selling the PS4 but keeping the 1tb ssd and putting original hard drive back in the PS4.

So - I want to swap the 2tb hard drive in the new gaming pc for the 1tb Samsung ssd. As the 2tb is a second drive I assume it is not as simple as just swapping the drives and that the 2tb is somehow set up as a game save drive.

Any idea how I go about swapping the drives?

Make an image of all partitions on the 2 TB drive.

Save the image on some other drive, probably external.

Remove the 2 TB drive.

Put the 1 TB in its place.

Restore the image of the 2 TB drive to the 1 TB drive.

Probably using Macrium Reflect, but other programs should work.

Tutorials on this site.

Or do I misunderstand your intent?

That’s fine - thanks. So just clone them basically? I was wondering if something might be set up on the pc to redirect saves to a particular drive - that might need setting up again if the drive changed.

Hazel123 said:

That’s fine - thanks. So just clone them basically? I was wondering if something might be set up on the pc to redirect saves to a particular drive - that might need setting up again if the drive changed.

No.

Not a clone.

An image and then a restoration of that image.

Cloning might work, but imaging seems to be more reliable.

Macrium can do either.

Different but related processes. Cloning has 1 step; imaging 2 (make the image, then restore it).

Probably complete it in no more than an hour if you were already familiar with Macrium.

The image file will be about half the size of the combined occupied space on all the partitions on the original drive. So, the drive you save it on has to have that much free space. Might be 20 or 500 gb, depending on your particular situation.

Cheers - yes of course - that’s the better way. It’s the “linking” that concerns me - ie if it’s set up to redirect saves to the second drive then presumably that will need resetting if it’s a different drive of a different size- so where in Windows would I look to find out how it’s designated where game saves go? 256 gb is much bigger than needed just fir windows so presumably some things will be saved on that drive and some on the bigger second drive and something set up to tell things where to go. Sorry for my lack of tech speak this evening - a bit tired!

I'm not tech-speak on gaming, but if you restore that image, it should have the same capability as the original drive...........that's what imaging does. Without any further fiddling.

If the save location has been removed, changed, or dropped dead, just reconfigure that location after the imaging is done.

Thanks. That’s the bit I’m not sure about- how to reconfigure game location saves.

Ok thanks. So as long as it has the same drive letter things should be redirected automatically? There is nothing on either drive to copy - it's a brand new pc - although I guess there maybe some manufacturer files on the second larger drive

I'd think so, but I don't game at all. Normally, the drive letter alone would be the critical factor and you can change that at will. I wouldn't expect the drive brand or size to be a factor.