How To Switch A Gaming Computer’s Hard Drive Without Losing Data?

Answer 1

A good gaming computer is hard to find, and many gamers decide to build their computers for the best possible features. Building a gaming computer is a great way to get what you want, but technology progresses, and every once in a while, you’ll need to perform a few upgrades to your gaming computer. One of the most difficult upgrades to perform is a hard drive upgrade, as most gamers store dozens of saved games, downloaded games, and other vital data on their hard drives.

Nevertheless, it’s important to upgrade your gaming computer’s hard drive occasionally, especially if you’ve noticed slow performance, clicking sounds, or other signs that the hard drive might fail soon. Backing up your saved games is usually not too difficult. You can either clone your hard drive to a new drive or buy an external hard drive to back up your data before switching out your gaming computer’s internal HDD.

It’s usually not a good idea to clone an internal hard drive simply to save your games, as the intricacies of modern operating systems like Windows XP and Windows 7 make it impossible to make a clone that immediately operates just like the old drive. You won’t be able to boot your operating system or load games that were stored on the original drive.

An external hard drive is generally a better tool. Copy the game directories for your favorite games to the external hard drive. Some games will have a separate folder marked saved games or something similar; otherwise, simply copy the whole directory.

When you install your new hard drive into your gaming computer, you’ll have to reinstall your old games, so be prepared. If you had any games on your previous hard drive that didn’t come in disk form, check with the game developers to make sure that you’ll be able to download a new version. Find out what format that each game uses to store save game files, and replace those files on the new hard drive with the save games that you’d copied onto the external hard drive. Switching a gaming computer’s HDD can be a hassle, but it’s a necessary chore.