Windows 10 Setting up Drive Partitions for Installing Windows 10

[AttilaMagyar]

Initial OS Windows XP. 250Gb HDD, 1 Partition C:. 4/2014 upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium. Still using single partition 250Gb C:. A year ago experienced various hangups and performance issues. Ran SeaTools by Seagate. Had HDD failures on long tests. Installed Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250Gb using USB cable. Tried to clone HDD C: drive to SSD C: Partition. Failed, so I had to do a clean Win 7 install. Went to Win 7 Forum on how to partition SSD for a system drive C: (70Gb) and user drive J: (163Gb). Refer to Win 7 Forum Tutorial 2674 to do this. Copied Pgm Files Folder from C: to J: Reinstalled Office. Began Cleaning up C partition to have only system information in C: partition. With the deadline for upgrading to Windows 10 approaching wanted to get the C: partition cleaned up. Did not happen as I had to upgrade to Win 10 Home on 7/2016. Have since installed Win Anniversary upgrade so I am at version 1607 OS Build 14393.105.
Question: What Folders and files belong on the System C: partition and then everything else should be in the non-system J: partition? If I copy the directory for the C: partition and post it in a file on this site can someone tell me if what is on there is correct or not?
AttilaMagyar

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Hi Roger,
Sorry to hear you are battling health issues; those are no fun at all. I hope you recover soon. This sounds like a very good way to go as we have discussed in some detail. Re-reading this thread, if you can spend some time finding the build date of your old XP computer, remember that if it was built prior to 2006, there's a 99% chance it won't run W10 properly, even if your machine passes the W10 COMPATIBILITY TEST:
Get Windows 10 app - Check Compatibility Report for Windows 10, which I mentioned earlier.

For backup procedures, take a look at the free Macrium Reflect Image backup software here:
In that regards, I strongly urge you to make an image backup of your existing Win7 or new W10 configuration using the free Macrium Reflect software found here: Macrium Reflect Free.
And if you've never done an Image backup before, you'll need an inexpensive external usb hard drive which run about $60 US for a 1TB drive which should give you plenty of space to store at least 3 complete backup images. This is a really good idea to have this capability to protect all your personal data from irretrievable data loss.
Here's a great step-by-step video from Britec on how to make your 1st Image Backup:
.

Many of us Techs here on WF use this software or similar to protect our aging (and new!) computers.

I'd also recommend that you consider doing both manual folder backup to your external hard drives via free backup software such as AOEMI Backupper or Paragon Software.

Finally, it's a good idea in addition to doing Image Backups and Manual Folder backups, you should consider doing Cloud storage backup as well. I use both Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive for free Cloud backups. And, on the recommendation of my local computer club president, I began using a paid-version of Cloud Backup called CrashPlan; which costs $60/yr. or only $5/month. It has already saved the bacon of one of my Customers who lost her main bootdrive which I could not retrieve anything from and it costs at least $550 to get anything off of it. We restored all her data from her CrashPlan backup in a couple of hours no problem!
Here's the CrashPlan site: Online Data Backup | Offsite, Onsite & Cloud | Crashplan.

I also am using Macrium to clone my 500GB bootdrive to a backup 500GB identical capacity backup drive on a once a month basis as well. As you can see, you need at least 3 levels of backup protection, and 1 of them needs to be outside of your home or apartment in the case of natural disaster such as flood, fire, earthquake, tornado, hurricane, typhoon, tsunami, etc. etc.


Best of luck,
<<<BBJ>>>