Transferring from old to new computer

[Qwertystop]

How exactly do I do it? Last time I needed to do this (which was transferring everything from a computer to that same computer after formatting it and reinstalling Windows in an attempt to fix things), I just backed everything up to an external hard drive using Windows Backup and then restored it all after. This resulted in permissions issues on all my files that needed to be fixed manually one by one (still working through those - I just fix them whenever I need to open them, didn't go through them all at once). Now I have an actual new computer, so the issue is compounded by changing from Windows 7 to 8.1. How do I do this?

[Max™]

From 7 to 8.1 the windows easy transfer thing should still work. Type that into the start button search and it should walk you through the process if you select "no I have not made a WET file" after the prompt shows up.

[shadow_archmagi]

Ways I'd do it:

1. Extract hard drive from old computer, implant into new computer. Now your files are where you need them, and your new computer has more hard drive space! Delicious cannibalization.

2. Connect new computer and old computer via ethernet cable. Move files via cable. (Note: Your post only refers to "files" which I believe is generally understood to refer only to data, such as pictures, documents, films, etc. If you wanted to transfer installed programs, that'd be trickier.)

[Qwertystop]

Ways I'd do it:

1. Extract hard drive from old computer, implant into new computer. Now your files are where you need them, and your new computer has more hard drive space! Delicious cannibalization.

2. Connect new computer and old computer via ethernet cable. Move files via cable. (Note: Your post only refers to "files" which I believe is generally understood to refer only to data, such as pictures, documents, films, etc. If you wanted to transfer installed programs, that'd be trickier.)

1: This is a laptop. And the old one is five three or four years old, so the new one both has more storage (more everything, really) and is smaller.

2: Would have worked. I ended up just using the easy transfer thing.

[shadow_archmagi]

1: This is a laptop. And the old one is five years old, so the new one both has more storage (more everything, really) and is smaller.


Well, personally, I feel like with a screwdriver and some determination, you can always find a way to jam more hard drives in there. :smallyuk: Can't have too many hard drives (Unless you go above eight. Then you've made a mistake. Run.)

[Mando Knight]

Well, personally, I feel like with a screwdriver and some determination, you can always find a way to jam more hard drives in there.

Not in a laptop, unless you feel like removing half the motherboard, the RAM, a possible disk drive...

[Qwertystop]

No disk drive here, though it does have a second hard drive - it's got... um. This is weird.

The store says it's got a 1 TB normal drive plus an 8 GB solid-state, unless I'm misreading it (Lenovo Y40 if you want to check), but the My Computer (renamed to This PC because windows 8.1 :smallyuk:) says it's got an 889 GB drive (the C: drive, with the OS and stuff) and a 24.9 GB drive (D:, and named LENOVO - it contains some, but not all, of the preinstalled drivers and programs). Clicking the properties of either and going to "Hardware" gets me to a single drive with a long name/number that includes "SSHD-8GB" at the end. It's the same for both drives. What's going on here?

[tyckspoon]

No disk drive here, though it does have a second hard drive - it's got... um. This is weird.

The store says it's got a 1 TB normal drive plus an 8 GB solid-state, unless I'm misreading it (Lenovo Y40 if you want to check), but the My Computer (renamed to This PC because windows 8.1 :smallyuk:) says it's got an 889 GB drive (the C: drive, with the OS and stuff) and a 24.9 GB drive (D:, and named LENOVO - it contains some, but not all, of the preinstalled drivers and programs). Clicking the properties of either and going to "Hardware" gets me to a single drive with a long name/number that includes "SSHD-8GB" at the end. It's the same for both drives. What's going on here?

Single drive, multiple partitions (a partition is what the OS perceives as a 'drive' regardless of the actual physical nature of that drive. You can hack a physical drive into as many logical 'drives' as you want.) Manufacturers started doing that when they decided it was too much trouble to provide physical backup/reinstall discs; that information is what's on that LENOVO partition. It's probably a hybrid drive - a standard terabyte drive with a small solid-state drive tacked on.

[Qwertystop]

Single drive, multiple partitions (a partition is what the OS perceives as a 'drive' regardless of the actual physical nature of that drive. You can hack a physical drive into as many logical 'drives' as you want.) Manufacturers started doing that when they decided it was too much trouble to provide physical backup/reinstall discs; that information is what's on that LENOVO partition. It's probably a hybrid drive - a standard terabyte drive with a small solid-state drive tacked on.

I know what partitions are - but it doesn't seem to add up to enough space. I know that the basic structure (whatever it's officially called) takes up some space that's subtracted directly from disk capacity when the system displays it, but isn't the lack here quite a lot?

Also, the LENOVO partition is more than three-quarters empty. And all that's in there are drivers and McAfee, no system-restore data.

And the SSD is for speed, right?

[Max™]

Drives are often sold as being a certain amount of bytes in base 10, while various programs list the sizes in binary.

A 1 TB drive should show up as being around 930 GB when this is done, and given that you had chunks of it partitioned for other stuff I wouldn't think 889 GB + 24 GB is too unusual, as it's only 10 or so less than I'd expect, and part of that could be listed as hidden drives or an 8 GB SSD for fast booting or something.

Glad the WET worked btw, I ended up making use of the fact that linux sees windows file systems easily to keep info last time I dealt with windows so I wasn't sure if it would do that readily or not.

[shadow_archmagi]

this website might help? (http://lifehacker.com/5950506/why-doesnt-my-new-hard-drive-show-the-right-amount-of-space)

I'm also told that there's some difficulty in manufacturing them so sizes are unreliable

[Max™]

Pronouncing them sounds funny (Gibibytes?), but if you look at drives you will often notice some places will list GiB, some will list GB. Dolphin (the KDE file manager) lists my 320 GB drive as 298 GiB.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=320+GB+in+GiB seems legit.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1000+GB+in+GiB says 1 TB = 931 GiB.

[Qwertystop]

this website might help? (http://lifehacker.com/5950506/why-doesnt-my-new-hard-drive-show-the-right-amount-of-space)

I'm also told that there's some difficulty in manufacturing them so sizes are unreliable

Oh, right. Forgot about that little discrepancy. Somehow.

[factotum]

What the drive will be is a 1Tb (or actually 930Gb, if we use the proper definitions for these things :smallsmile:) drive with an 8Gb SSD cache--that sort of hybrid drive is supposed to provide most of the benefits of both systems (fast access for small, commonly-accessed files due to the SSD, with the large storage at reasonable price spinning rust provides). My guess is that it's showing as less than 930Gb because there'll be a hidden recovery partition on there that you're supposed to use to restore your OS if it gets borked.

[Winter_Wolf]

Pedantic and late to the game, but an Ethernet cable cannot directly connect two computers unless there is a router involved. What you'd need is a crossover cable, which does use the same port as Ethernet but the wires are attached to the connectors differently. As it happens I have a crossover cable and they're pretty great despite some naysayers. I got mine at RadioShack and it was relatively cheap and loads faster than trying to use the wifi router.

[Excession]

Actually, all gigabit Ethernet cards should support auto MDI-X, meaning they will automatically switch to crossover if connected to another computer with a normal cable. Even if you don't have gigabit, some older 100 mbit cards had it too. The crossover cable is mostly unneeded now.

[KillianHawkeye]

Am I the only one who thinks that referring to drives by their numbers of billions or trillions of bytes instead of their actual value in gigabytes and terabytes ought to be considered a form of false advertizing when they falsely use the terms "gigabyte" and "terabyte"? :smallannoyed:

[Keris]

There have been a few lawsuits against storage manufacturers for being 'misleading', which is why you'll always find it stated on the box that 1 GB = 1 000 000 000 B or similar.

The thing is, a billion bytes is a gigabyte. 'Giga-' is an SI prefix meaning 109, not 230. At one point it was convenient to use 'kilo' to mean 210, since 1024≈1000 and computer memory comes in powers of 2. But there's no reason we need to stick with it nowadays, and particularly not for HDDs, which aren't constrained by powers of 2. Many modern OSes will report size using the SI prefixes correctly, though Windows continues to stick with the traditional units, and there are standard prefixes for the 'powers of 1024' units (kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, tebi-, and so on), though they're rarely used.

[Qwertystop]

Am I the only one who thinks that referring to drives by their numbers of billions or trillions of bytes instead of their actual value in gigabytes and terabytes ought to be considered a form of false advertizing when they falsely use the terms "gigabyte" and "terabyte"? :smallannoyed:

I'm not sure it's standardized enough for that to hold up - Apple computers count billions or trillions as well, according to that thing shadow_archmagi linked a few posts up. Also, base ten honestly makes more sense, because kilo-, mega-, giga-, etc. are SI prefixes.

EDIT: Ninjaed.