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Requesting guidance for upgrading a single partition on a drive

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Fellow users,

I'm reaching out for any help you can offer on a specific scenario I'm considering that may be a bit out of the ordinary. 

I currently have a single regular HDD that houses my system backups on one partition, some photos and videos on another, and game installs (Steam etc.) on a third. I'm considering adding an SSD to my system to take the game installations. The idea would be to use ATI to clone or backup/restore the game partition to the new SSD and then expand the backup partition on the old drive so I can keep a longer backup history. 

My question is: is there a way to do this where I can migrate the installs and drive letter and Windows will accept the new SSD as the new location for that drive without confusing it with the old drive? Not sure if I can just switch drive letters and have things work or if Windows 10 is now tracking disks with GUIDs or some other method such that my game installs will break post migration. 

Thanks for any help you can offer. Really appreciate everybody who takes their time to help on these forums. 

Best,
Philip.

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Philip, it may be possible to do what you are asking but you will need to do a number of things to make this work.

Information related to your game installations will also be recorded in the Windows Registry and reflected in the Start Menu / Programs menu entries etc, where this will be shown for the specific partition drive path, including the drive letter of this partition.

When you install the new SSD drive, this would eventually need to be assigned the same drive letter that your current games partition has.

You cannot use cloning to copy a single partition - cloning works at a whole disk level, not at a partition level, so you would need to make a full backup of your Games partition and save this to either your normal backup location if it has sufficient free space, or else to an external backup drive.

Once your backup is done, then install the SSD and restore the backup to this new drive.

You would then need to either change or remove the drive letter for the Games partition and then change the drive letter assigned to the new SSD to be that games partition drive letter.

One further point that you will need to check is whether any of your games rely on the disk signature of the original install drive for activation.  This is where removing the drive letter for the original games partition and / or hiding this partition may help with the testing of your games installs on the SSD.

Thanks Steve. I guess it's the reliance on disk signature and/or volume ID that I'm concerned about, but I suppose there's no way around that without just copying the entire drive. I'd prefer not to do that, but on reflection maybe it would be easier to copy the entire drive to the SSD and then move back the backup and photo partitions. Finally I could enlarge the game partition on the new drive. That way the disk signature would be preserved for the games. 

Philip, if copying the entire drive to the SSD then your next challenge are the sizes involved for doing this.  Typically HDD's are larger than SSD's unless you are willing to pay a premium to purchase a large drive.  You may want to have an intermediate drive where you could move the bulkier data from the HDD to and then reduce the data footprint on the HDD to a minimum that you want to move to the SSD.