Introduction: When I built my desktop, I got two separate hard drives, one for OS and one for everything else. Or it was supposed to be anyway. Quite a few things install to the C drive by default, and I couldn't figure out how to change it to my other drive. The smaller one for the OS was around 50 GB, and the other one is 1 TB. Due to the default installing problem and OS updating taking more and more space, I ran out of space relatively quickly. I did some research and found that turning off the hibernate mode would save a good bit of space and did that, then I did something of a patch job by copying whatever files I could into my other hard drive and put shortcut links to it in the C drive so it could still be accessed normally, but still only take up space in the larger drive. Eventually I still ran out of space, so I waited as long as I could and then accepted the Windows 10 update in the hope that it would wipe all the extraneous update files and get me some more free space to stop the warnings and errors. I have been hovering around 3-4 GB free for a while, but I know as updates come it will get used up over time.
Actual Question: I have gotten a replacement drive that has 120 GB. Both the original and the new drive are mSATA, so I can't just hook them up together and copy everything over. I do still have my Windows 8.1 disk and code, if I can install that and then upgrade to Windows 10 again. How should I go about upgrading to prevent losing files, if possible, and will I be able to use the same Windows key on the new drive?
My apologies if this should have gone in the hard drive section, I wasn't sure.
Actual Question: I have gotten a replacement drive that has 120 GB. Both the original and the new drive are mSATA, so I can't just hook them up together and copy everything over. I do still have my Windows 8.1 disk and code, if I can install that and then upgrade to Windows 10 again. How should I go about upgrading to prevent losing files, if possible, and will I be able to use the same Windows key on the new drive?
My apologies if this should have gone in the hard drive section, I wasn't sure.
