I have a 250GB SSD boot drive and a 1TB SSD, both of which are NVME. I’m buying another 2TB NVME and I don’t know how clone drives so I’m planning to ask the store to clone the contents of the 1TB drive to the 2TB drive, then the 250GB drive to the 1TB SSD and use it as the new boot drive. I’ll use the 250GB SSD as an external drive. Since I’m replacing the drives, I’m not sure if cloning the drives will also clone the drive letters. If it doesn’t, do I need to bring my PC to the store to change them, or can I just remove the drives and bring them to the store? Once the cloning process is done, can I take them home and expect them to work without further configuration?"
No, it shouldn’t have the same the drive letter. It’s sort of similar to how your computer assigns a new drive letter to each USB drive you plug in. Drive letters aren’t permanent and are based on the order they’re plugged in (except C, which is usually your operating system).
Cloning is extremely easy to do on your own by the way. You can use something like Macrium Reflect Free Edition. Then you just open the program, click on the drive you want to copy, then click on the drive where you want the data to go. Just like if you were uploading files to google drive or something. Cloning just copies all of the files, drivers, operating system, other data, etc. It doesn’t literally “clone” the drive (like the drive letter). Let me know if you have any questions, I’d be happy to help :)
the 250GB is currently my C drive and the 1TB is the D drive. I want to clone the 250GB to the 1TB and make it the C drive and the 2TB is the new D drive
it’s basically like this:
clone 1TB (old D drive) to 2TB (new D drive)
clone 250GB (old C drive) to 1TB (new C drive)
If I boot up the pc with the cloned 1TB drive installed, will it be automatically recognized as the C drive?
Why not just make the new 2tb the new c drive? It would save you from a headache.
Yes, the PC automatically assigns drive letters. The windows drive will get a C (but you don’t need to do anything). I’ll just add that after cloning, you might need to temporarily disconnect the 250gb. Sometimes your PC might get confused if you have two copies of windows attached (the 250gb and the 1tb). You can fix this later on by plugging in the 250gb externally and wiping it.
But yeah, you don’t need to get hung up on drive letters, all that matters is that you have a hard drive with an OS like Windows for your computer to boot from. If you copy it over, and then start up your PC with the new copied drive attached, it should boot from it and that’ll become the new C drive.
so correct me if I’m wrong: After I’ve finished cloning the drives, I can just install the 1TB in the CPU slot and 2TB in the chipset slot and everything will just works without me doing anything else? My program paths won’t be affected in anyway?
I’m wiping the 250GB to use it as an external drive anyway so it won’t be installed on the motherboard