SSD/HDD dual setup

I picked up an internal 1TB Western Digital SSD to add to the stock internal HDD and external HDD already present. The internal drive is the boot and basically everything else drive (C; the external HDD is for my music collection (E.

My intent was to clone the internal drive to the new SSD (A, which I’ve done using EaseUS Todo. The plan is to delete downloads, MS Office documents, and other things not requiring a quick drive from A: and access those from C: when I need them. Games, Windows, booting up, etc. will be handled by A:.

The clone was successful. I rebooted and went into the boot menu to change the boot drive from C: to A:. Continued the boot and it hung up at Verifying DMI Pool. Turned off the system by holding down the power button. Rebooted and it loaded Windows—albeit, not exceptionally quickly, as is my experience with SSDs. My suspicion is that it went back to booting from C:. This got me thinking about some other logistics issues:

All of my desktop shortcuts reference .exe files in my C drive because that’s where they’ve always lived. Clicking on an existing shortcut would only reference the C drive if I manually changed to path, right? Can this issue be remedied by reversing the drive letters (C to A and A to C)? My attempt to reassign the C drive to F so I could rename A to C was unsuccessful (system didn’t allow the change).

I’m more than a little confused and I want SSD speed. Please advise. Thanks.

Bruce said:

historically A:\ and B:\ are for floppies.
certainly no reason why this still needs to be the case but old legacy firmware or software may get their knickers in a twist.

this is what I would do.

clone old C:\ to SSD
remove old C:\ and replace it with the SSD.
reboot and the SSD is now the boot drive.
add the old C:\ back, changing BIOS boot order first.
now with the old C:\ being F:\ or G:\ or what have you, right click on C:\users\{your profile}\Docs and click Properties, Location Tab, click on the folder path in the field and change the first letter from C to whatever the drive now is. Hit OK to continue, then OK to Create then OK to Move.
repeat for Vids, Downloads, Pics and Music.

Click to expand...

I will try that this morning. Thank you.

Bruce said:

historically A:\ and B:\ are for floppies.
certainly no reason why this still needs to be the case but old legacy firmware or software may get their knickers in a twist.

this is what I would do.

clone old C:\ to SSD
remove old C:\ and replace it with the SSD.
reboot and the SSD is now the boot drive.
add the old C:\ back, changing BIOS boot order first.
now with the old C:\ being F:\ or G:\ or what have you, right click on C:\users\{your profile}\Docs and click Properties, Location Tab, click on the folder path in the field and change the first letter from C to whatever the drive now is. Hit OK to continue, then OK to Create then OK to Move.
repeat for Vids, Downloads, Pics and Music.

Click to expand...

I disconnected the C drive, booted up, changed the boot drive to A--still hung up at the Verifying DMI Pool message. I am going to try wiping the A drive and re-cloning.

Bruce said:

and don't use it as A:\
clone old C:\ to SSD, turn PC off, swap the drives around and reboot.
leave the boot order as it was when the PC booted normally with the old C:\ drive.

if the cloning went to plan, the PC will be none the wiser that it now has a SSD.

Click to expand...

It’s still hanging at Verifying DMI Pool. I’ll try a different cloning app today.