PC/Hard Drive Question
 

C drive is a SSD that is working fine. D drive is a 2 TB standard hard drive.

My HDD is dying. There are lots of bad sectors and its gotten to the point that with some frequency under normal operation, my D drive will hit 100% disk usage and I'll be forced to do a hard shutdown.

I've backed up a bunch of files from my D drive, most of the stuff I have there that isn't backed up is my Steam library, GIT repositories, etc, stuff I can get back. I'm ready to be rid of this one and to install the new one that I've purchased.


My question:

How badly is windows going to freak the hell out when my D drive is gone...
all of these installed programs that it won't be able to find? I don't even remember how I did it but I linked part of My Documents over to the C drive so that my Chrome cache sits on D (b/c my SSD is pretty small)?

WITHOUT REINSTALLING WINDOWS -- its a last resort, I have work stuff installed that will be a somewhat significant problem obtaining again that I'm willing to spend many hours of time cleaning things up on my own to avoid it -- how should I try to go about this?

I think your best option is to clean up what you can before installing the new HDD. For instance, uninstall Steam and the other stuff you can get back. Delete all the other files you have backed up elsewhere. Heck, uninstall Chrome too to maybe fix any issues.

After that, I think you'll just have to see what errors pop up along the way and try to fix them. It really shouldn't be that bad.

If you can, hook both the old drive and the new drive up at the same time and copy everything over to the new drive. Then remove the old drive, and change the drive letter of the new one to D:. That should be the cleanest way, and Windows shouldn't throw a fit.

It took a bit of effort but this worked in the end and was way easier than anything else I would have done, thanks.

Something during startup was hitting a bad sector on my D drive... I guess? within a minute of starting up it would be showing at 100% I/O and wouldn't stop until I did a hard shutdown. Eventually I was able to get into safe mode with a command prompt and robocopy took about 4 hours but it got the job done.

Much appreciated!

This made me realize that this is the first time I've ever had a hard drive die on me before I was ready to just purchase or build a completely new system. I've been lucky.

Awesome, glad that worked for you!

Windows 10 seems really hard on regular hard drives. It's killed 2 of mine since I upgraded, and before that I had never had a HDD failure.