Cloned Drive and Moving Folders

mealmond

Hi

I have and HP 6530 netbook , just installed an ssd drive in place of the dvd drive.

I have cloned the drive and changed the start up to the new ssd drive and windows loads without issue. I then formated the old drive to use for storage.

I wanted to move my the usual My Documents, My Photos etc and followed the online instructions to change the folder location

This is where I think I have gone wrong as it started okay but I now have a problem.

I now keep getting a file called desktop in the old hard drive that mirrors the desktop and it says the hard drive is no longer accesable, even though I can see it. At the same time I get folders in the new SSD drive saying desktop.

I have tried to format the old hard drive again but have the same issue.

I therefore have the SSD drive cloned but it appears I cannot move files to the old hard drive.

It must be something I did whilst changing the my documents folder as all was fine before then but I cannot work out how to put it right.

I am off line now till tomorrow but thought I would ask for any suggestions as to what I may have done and what I can do.


Thanks

Martin

gjchester

mealmond wrote: »

Hi

I have and HP 6530 netbook , just installed an ssd drive in place of the dvd drive.

I have cloned the drive and changed the start up to the new ssd drive and windows loads without issue. I then formated the old drive to use for storage.

I wanted to move my the usual My Documents, My Photos etc and followed the online instructions to change the folder location

This is where I think I have gone wrong as it started okay but I now have a problem.

I now keep getting a file called desktop in the old hard drive that mirrors the desktop and it says the hard drive is no longer accesable, even though I can see it. At the same time I get folders in the new SSD drive saying desktop.

I have tried to format the old hard drive again but have the same issue.

I therefore have the SSD drive cloned but it appears I cannot move files to the old hard drive.

It must be something I did whilst changing the my documents folder as all was fine before then but I cannot work out how to put it right.

I am off line now till tomorrow but thought I would ask for any suggestions as to what I may have done and what I can do.


Thanks

Martin

If you cloned the hard drive to the SSD and then put the SSD in the laptop bay (I assume in a drive caddy of some sort) then you may have issues due to what it boots from.


You need to clone the HDD to the SSD then take out the old HDD and put the SSD in the place of the old drive, otherwise you may be booting from the wrong place.

IN theory there's no reason as to have a set order, but some devices will always try and boot form the internal Hard disk unless told otherwise as they may not e able to see the drive in the drive bay until drivers have loaded, other system don't really consider the drive bay as bootable.


I'd suggest putting the SSD in the internal bay and getting that working, without adding in any drive in a removable bay, if its cloned correctly it should be a straight swap.


You'll get more benefit from having the SSD as a boot drive than a document store.

mealmond

Thanks for the reply, it would be a shame if I had to move the hard drives round.
Windows operates perfectly, I just wanted to free as much space as possible on the SSD drive and make use of the empty drive.
I am sure the error came whilst changing the location from the new drive to the old drive, I may have to try a fresh Windows install and see what happens, there is little information online either, some with the same issue but no solution.

Martin

gjchester

The Documents folders sit on the C: drive, is a system folder under c:\Users\ {username}


You should be able to right click the My Documents folder in there and select Location to tell it where the default location is, however not all folders really exist, some are links. and some system folders, and will not allow re-direction.


Honestly move the drives around, as if the removable media is not seen at boot time for any reason Windows may try to access them and fail, and so move the locations without telling you.


Desktop cannot be moved, so I suspect this is part of the issue, its not seen at boot, and Windows automatically makes a replacement. Swap the drives, and only re-direct the user folders such as my Documents, my pictures and so on onto the secondary drive, but remember that if you have to rebuild the drive you need to remember what was pointing where.

mealmond

Thanks for the advice gjchester, looks like I will be moving the drives round tonight, just hope it solves the issues.

Having looked a bit more online I now can see that what I did was to do with moving the location of "my documents", I cannot remember if it was this actual folder but it was one of those, a second box came up and I pressed proceed, I should have checked first, the warning came up something similar to " do you want to redirect folder into another system folder located at " "If you proceed with redirection you will not be able to separate them or restore default locations"

I just hope swapping the hard drives round gets me back to normal, annoying as before missing the warning the cloning had gone well and everything was working, I just wanted to tidy things up. Everything is working though and I don't think I have lost anything, it is just odd when I try to move any of the folders, I just get a file saying desktop.

Martin