acortada said:
Hi Raptor 88,
It worked once I removed the old hdd from the computer. I didn't know I had to do that, I thought that once I had changed the boot order in the bios that Windows would boot it from the SSD and I would be able to erase the old hdd, but that was not the case. You really have to unplug the old hdd for Windows to adopt the SSD as the system drive.
I have an external hdd docking station, so I just used that to wipe all the partitions on the old hdd and created a single one. I used EaseUS Partition Master to do it, which is free (just had to be careful not to install the other software that they try to force you to install). Although I think you can do the same with Disk Management in Windows.
Thank you for the tips about separating the system from the data, it really makes sense and I will adopt it.
Also, many thanks for all the support given to me during the whole process!
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You're welcome. Glad to hear that you got it all working.
There's another really good reason to only have Windows and installed programs on your SSD and to not store data on it. SSDs do a thing called "wear leveling". Since flash memory that SSDs are made of have a finite amount of writes before they start to fail (unlike HDDS that use magnetic technology on spinning platters), wear leveling distributes the writes to the unused space on the SSD. The more unused space, the more space to distribute writes to.
For example, say one fills up the SSD with data so there is just a small amount of unused space left on the SSD. The writes will be forced to happen over and over in the small unused space which will shorten the life of the SSD. Not to mention that fact that Windows can have problems if there is a "small amount" of unused space left in the C: partition.
Again, don't try to move the Window's "user" folders like Documents, Music, Videos, etc to the D: DATA drive. Just don't use them on the C: drive. Windows does allow moving those types of folders to another drive or partition but I've heard of too many users having problems when they did that. Instead, almost all programs allow the user to designate where their default folder will be. --- For instance, MS Word defaults to store data in the Documents folder in the C: partition, but the user can change that in options to any folder in their D: partition. So when you do a "save as", Word will default to the designated folder in the D: partition.
All the best,
Raptor88