Transferring data from old W7 PC to new W10 PC

[stearman65]

I have around 140gb of data on my old W7 Professional PC C drive, & 600gb on my E drive. I want to keep both systems operating until I am familiar with the new PC which will be on W10 Professional. I thought I would buy a 2TB stand alone HD to copy what I want from my old PC then paste it into my new PC. When I did this previously I think I did it direct from PC to PC & used some data transfer hard & software but it was a bit of a fraught operation.
Has anyone any suggestions or can foresee any problems on what I intend to do.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Easiest way will be just to put the drives straight into the new PC, then you can copy files where you need to and have the old drives as additional backup drives.

You won’t be able to copy your win 7 installation over to the new PC for licensing issues and as drivers wouldn’t be correct. If you wanted win 7 still (highly advise not to though), then you’d have to reinstall from scratch.

 

[Rakk]

I thought I would buy a 2TB stand alone HD to copy what I want from my old PC then paste it into my new PC.

That should work perfectly fine.
I think what I did with my last PC was get the new PC running, turn both the new and old off and moved the old drive into my new machine and just transferred over from the old drive to the ones in my new machine, and after copying the relevant data then returning said old drive back to the old machine. All this meant was that I didn't need the extra external hard drive to move stuff around
You may be able to set up sharing on both your machines so they'll talk to each other over your network - it's easy with two Win10 machines, dunno if Win7 may make it more difficult - though transferring over a network will be slower than your idea of using an external drive or the way I did it.

 

[stearman65]

That should work perfectly fine.
I think what I did with my last PC was get the new PC running, turn both the new and old off and moved the old drive into my new machine and just transferred over from the old drive to the ones in my new machine, and after copying the relevant data then returning said old drive back to the old machine. All this meant was that I didn't need the extra external hard drive to move stuff around
You may be able to set up sharing on both your machines so they'll talk to each other over your network - it's easy with two Win10 machines, dunno if Win7 may make it more difficult - though transferring over a network will be slower than your idea of using an external drive or the way I did it.

Hi Rakk
I thought I'd buy a new HD as my current stand alone HDD storage (2 x 1TB) is getting full. That way I have a belt & braces if anything should go pop while copying from old PC to new HDD, I'd still have the files on the old PC & hopefully on the new HDD before I copy them onto the new PC. My old HDD's have been very reliable, & I only power them up when I need to copy videos or music to my current PC. They are both mains power. One is 7 years old.

 

[stearman65]

Easiest way will be just to put the drives straight into the new PC, then you can copy files where you need to and have the old drives as additional backup drives.

You won’t be able to copy your win 7 installation over to the new PC for licensing issues and as drivers wouldn’t be correct. If you wanted win 7 still (highly advise not to though), then you’d have to reinstall from scratch.

I'm afraid I'm not Tech savvy enough to do that, I'm almost 80 & doing that would probably bring on a stroke. The W7 data will be redundant as my new PC will be on W10. Thanks anyway.

 

[andrewgupta]

Easiest way will be just to put the drives straight into the new PC, then you can copy files where you need to and have the old drives as additional backup drives.

You won’t be able to copy your win 7 installation over to the new PC for licensing issues and as drivers wouldn’t be correct. If you wanted win 7 still (highly advise not to though), then you’d have to reinstall from scratch. mcdvoice

yup agree as me too transferred from win 7 to win10

 

[stearman65]

I'm waiting for my new PC to arrive, ordered last Tuesday. In the mean time, I bought a 2TB HD & copied all the data from my old PC's C & E drives, which took around 3 hours. So when the new PC arrives I can get it running to my satisfaction, then cherry pick what I want to go on the new machine from the storage drive.

 

[ubuysa]

You might want to backup your browser bookmarks to that external drive too so you can get them back quickly. There may well be other stuff in C:\Users\....\AppData that you want to keep for use on your new PC. Personally I would copy the whole folder (C:\Users....\AppData) just in case I needed anything from it later.

 

[stearman65]

I've copied the whole C drive so I assumed that was in there?

 

[ubuysa]

I've copied the whole C drive so I assumed that was in there?

Yes indeed. [emoji3]

via Tapatalk

 

[richardhendrick]

Easiest way will be just to put the drives straight into the new PC, then you can copy files where you need to and have the old drives as additional backup drives.

You won’t be able to copy your win 7 installation over to the new PC for licensing issues and as drivers wouldn’t be correct. If you wanted win 7 still (highly advise not to though), then you’d have to reinstall from scratch.

yes, indeed that works great.

 

[Oussebon]

Locking for necro - OP can start new thread if required.