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I have two NVMe's and a 7 year old 1T WD Black HDD and now that old HDD is making weird "scratching" sounds and "whining" sounds. The drive still works but I know for a fact that it's no longer healthy so I want to get rid of it.

I mainly used it for old games, storage, and just random things.

It's drive (E:).

My question is what is the proper way to go about replacing it without having to format my entire PC? I already uninstalled all the games that were installed onto it and backed up any files that were important to me.

Do I just simply remove it and throw on a new SSD? Will windows "delete" the drive (E:) from the registry and see the new SSD as the new drive (E:)? I know this is probably a silly question but this is the first time ive had to deal with this issue.

Any helpful answers will be appreciated

Install new SSD. Use the free trial of Macrium Reflect to clone the old drive onto the new SSD. Use Windows Disk Management to re-size the partition to use all of the space on the new SSD. Remove the old drive. Re-assign the drive letter of the new drive to match the letter that the old one had. Done.

It's not a boot drive, so just copy/paste all the directories and files from the root dir. No need to uninstall, and you can change drive letters from Disk Management.

If you want, you can verify the copy afterwards.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Install new SSD. Use the free trial of Macrium Reflect to clone the old drive onto the new SSD. Use Windows Disk Management to re-size the partition to use all of the space on the new SSD. Remove the old drive. Re-assign the drive letter of the new drive to match the letter that the old one had. Done.

Ahh I already uninstalled all the games I had on the HDD i'm just waiting for the SSD replacement to get here. I also moved any photos/videos I had on it to my main NVMe (for now). Basically drive (E:) is empty now.

So do I just simply remove the faulty drive now and install the new SSD when it gets here? Or do I need to wait and install the SSD while the faulty drive is still installed then once the new SSD is recognized by windows I change the drive letter of the new SSD to (E:) and then finally remove the faulty drive?

You don't need to "transfer" drive letters from one drive to another.
If you remove your current E any new drive can use it. And if both drives are connected, change E to something else, then the new drive to E.

Just run Disk Management, pick whatever volume you want, and choose whichever letter:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... ive-letter

Best case, Windows will conveniently forget that you had an E: after you remove the faulty drive, and re-assign the new drive with this "first available (again)" letter.

Worst case, do what meerkt suggested and re-assign E: to the new drive with diskmgmt.

No sweat.

"

"meerkt" wrote:

You don't need to ""transfer"" drive letters from one drive to another.
If you remove your current E any new drive can use it even through computer monitoring software . And if both drives are connected, change E to something else, then the new drive to E.

Just run Disk Management, pick whatever volume you want, and choose whichever letter:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... ive-letter

I don't understand .. but if I delete drive E with all the memory, how will the information be transferred to another drive?"