Is there a way to move the contents of two hard drives onto a third hard drive. All three are Win 10 drives but may be of different Win versions? One windows version is newer than the other two. What software could I use to keep it all simple? ( not a real whiz at computers) I can follow pics and directions pretty well for an older guy. Thanks
The version of windows doesn't matter for DATA I would just copy and paste to the drive you want to use. You'll have to pay attention as there may be duplicated that come up or files that are not usually moved to a different drive
If they're in different computers I would just move the drive to the computer you want to move the data too. Drive doesn't have to be screwed just connected to a SATA cable and power cable.
That failing you use a SATA to USB Adapter and connect the drive you want to move files from to the computer drive you want to move the data to
I appreciate you help. I think the USB/SATA cable will be the easiest for me. THANKS again
OK, you have 3 drives, they all have Windows. One of the drives boots the computer. Lets call this the Destination drive. Now connect one of the secondary drives via internally using a SATA data cable and one of the power plugs from the PSU. When you boot into Windows on the destination drive, you should also see the secondary drive in This PC. You can create a folder on the Destination computer and call it Backup or whatever. Open this folder and copy the User files from the Secondary drive (ie) X:\Users\[UserName] (where X: is the drive letter of the secondary drive) to the folder on the Destination drive. After that is done, do the same for the Third drive.
Unless you need it 3 drives with Windows 10 on them, after copying the files and backing them up to another drive, I would Format that secondary drive. Then I would copy back the Backup folder to this computer and add the User files from the Destination HDD. In thie same Backup File. Now you have a backup of the files on a separate drive as well as having the original consolidated files on the C: drive.
Hi there
Another solution so you don't have to get rid of the 2 older drives is to do as follows
1) copy with File explorer etc data to 3rd drive
2) set two smaller drives as "spanned disk"
3) now you've got essentially 2 HDD's one consisting of 2 HDD's spanned as a single disk and a bigger one.
What Windows really needs though is to have some sort of software RAID so combining HDD's into a bigger composite volume would be quite advantageous.
Cheers
jimbo
Just be aware that if you are using 3.5" HDD disks then the USB socket might not be able to supply enough juice to power them, in which case get a USB to SATA cable with the external power option or a powered USB hub which can handle the demands.
As you go up the scale from USB 2.0 to 3.0 to 3.1 Gen 2 the trend is more available juice, so it depends on what USB sockets you have on your PC and how power efficient the drives are. Ideally look at the drive specs and see how much power they need first...
Thanks to everyone for the help, WE got the job completed without a major snafu. (snafu= old feller speak)
23 skidoo, I am an old feller too. I am glad you got it sorted. Please tell us which method you ended up doing, so others my learn as well
There is susfu too: SNAFU - Wikipedia
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