Have new HD I want as main drive, what to do?

K

Kuo

Gawd
Joined
Jun 7, 2001
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i have a dilemma.. i want to make a new HD I have my main HD (thus eventually throwing out my old one, which is an IBM Deathstar 60 gig)

Now it's been about 3-4 yrs since I did any type of format on my old drive, so I have a lot of "stuff" on it.

My dilemma is... a clean format would be a good thing for my computer. It'll kill whatever I didn't want on my machine initially, that somehow got on it, right off.

The problem is I have a number of software that falls under two catageries. One is that it'll take forever to re-install and patch (eg MMO games such as FF11, it'll take at least 6 hrs to re-do the full install and patch). Another are for applications which I have customized settings that I cannot remember all of. I still use these applications periodically but if I had to set it up again, I probably won't remember how (a lot of these apps are video encoding related, so I have all these numbers and stuff calculated long ago that I no longer remember how to do).

So what's my best course of action to clean my system yet perserve as much as I can?
 
Probably what he said ^^^

A copy of Norton Ghost or something sounds about right.
 
I reformat every 6 months or so and usually just locate my actual config files in the app directory and copy them over to my fresh install afterward. usually works for almost every app if you can find the right file. You could always just do a fresh install, install exact same version of app you had on the old install, copy over whole directory - replacing the files. Should go off without too many problems from my experience.
 
I thought about that..

but if I clone the drive, won't it literally be an identical copy? As in I'll get all the "bad stuff" in Windows that I'm trying to get rid of?

I was thinking of clean installing Windows, then installing the software I have in question. But after installing, I would copy the full directory over to my new drive. That way the installation puts the necessary Windows files I need (such as registry), but the settings are all copied over.

The concern of course is if the settings aren't stored in my installed directory but elsewhere. For example settings stored in registry.

[edit] Pixel posted at the same time I did with what I was thinking about doing, heh.
 
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