Dual Boot Installation, & Migration

Greetings, my username is dragondagoth and I used to be a member of the seven forums and this one as well. This serves as my first post given it must have been a long time since I posted and my account is no longer on here.

The reason for this post is I have a new M.2 disk, and my OS is on an SSD, and it is rather full with programs. I have three other hdds that contain programs. My question is, if I were to create a dual boot to potentially use the M.2 disk as the primary OS, would I be able to copy the files from my SSD disk so they connect to the programs on the other three drives?

If this reads a little convoluted M.2 (New system drive A:\\) contains Dual booted OS. SSD (Old system drive still in use contains C:\\) Other drives are D:\\ E:\\ and F:\\. E:\\ has something I want to be able to use on A:\\ such as the new game Example. Could I copy the Example.exe place it on A:\\desktop\ will the program run with ease. Or would I need to also copy the regedit files from C:\\ and move them to A:\\ so there will not be any issues should I run into any.

Thank you for reading this far, also thank you in advance for responding.

Yes Macboatmaster, I have one computer with four hard disc drives, and an operating system on C:\\ drive. I am looking to put Windows 10 on my new hard disc drive, which is D:\\., essentially making the one computer I have a dual boot computer (for the time being).

I have programs on all of my drives and I want to be able to access them once I put an OS on D:\\. If that is possible then I am going to wean everything from C:\\ onto D:\\ and then change/ swap the drive letters around so that programs from the other HDDs can be mapped back to where they're connected.

If you boot from d it will come up as c not d

As @Samuria stated, whatever drive you boot into - it will become C: drive.

In regards to either moving programs to another drive - or running programs from a different drive, that depends entirely upon the program. Most programs, when you install them, put files into various Windows system folders and may make registry entries. For those programs it is next to impossible to just copy them to a new drive, or run them from a second installation of Windows, without actually reinstalling the entire program.

Some programs are truly portable. They will be self contained to run the from the folder they are "installed" to. Those types of programs can be either moved around to different drives or run from different drives separate from the OS.

Finally, mostly games, run under a host program. Steam and Ubisoft UPlay are examples. For those you have to re-install the host program, but then the host program can run the game from it's own folder. So you don't have to actually re-install the entire game (which may several GB in size). You simply have to go into the host program and point it to the existing installation of the game.

I created the dual boot last night, prior to checking up on the responses here. Samuria was correct about how the drives letters swap. Also thank you for the in depth explanation NavyLCDR, your explanation was what I wanted to know in the end. With a twenty five MB internet connection it would take aeons to redownload all of my games from Origin, Steam etc., but I've managed to test it out, some games with a little tinkering around were good to go, others needed some verification, and three I think I will need to redownload which is not a train-smash. As for the other programs, what I thought about was copying registry files and other elements from the other drive, but that would take much longer than I would like and tinkering with the registry one wrong move and I would have to do it all over again. Anyhow, thank you all for the help!

I know how you feel. I ran out of space on my boot SSD. I installed a spare hard drive to add more programs and games. The spare hard drive eventually started to go bad. I decided I could at least clone the SSD to a new larger SSD. That would allow all my programs to reside on one SSD. Unfortunately every time I tried to boot the new SSD I got a BSOD. I gave up.

I booted the original SSD. I went through and uninstalled all my games. I did this because I learned the hard way that activating some games too many times causes a new install to fail. I would get the message "Too many activations".

I removed the old M.2 SSD and installed the new M.2 SSD. I did a clean install of Windows 10 Pro. After that I reinstalled everything. I have a lot of games. Some from Origin, Rockstar, Steam and Uplay. It took me a week to get everything back to where it was. I used almost 500GB of data from my ISP in February during the reinstall.

I did know Steam allows you to move games. I decided that since the drive these games were on was failing I was better off downloading them again and reinstalling them.

BTW, since I have a lot of space on my new SSD I decided to figure out how to install some of the old games that previously would not work on Windows 10. I got most of them to work on Windows 10 now.