I have FSX, P3D and some games on a mechanical hard drive and am considering cloning it over to an SSD.  Will my add-ons work correctly after the move?  I have payware aircraft from most of the major publishers. Are there some, such as PMDG, that will require uninstalling and reinstalling after the change?  I understand FSX should work correctly but that P3D requires an uninstall and reinstall.  Any tips? Thanks.

My experience with FSX is that you can copy the whole FSX folder to the new drive and

then rename the drives so that the new drive has the name of the previous drive, like E:

or whatever it was called before.  That is all you need to do.

 

No idea about P3D.

Same for P3D.

I just did this with P3d2, but I had the ability to move everything on that HDD to another drive first. After I did that, I went into the Control panel disk management app and changed the drive letter on the original HDD. Then I set up the SSD partition and used the original FSX drive letter. Of course this won't work if FSX is on your system drive to start with.

 

However, all is not lost. Here is my cookbook for doing the transfer if the sim is in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X.

 

1. If the new SSD is not already formatted, run the Control Panel's Disk Management app and create a MBR partition and give the SSD the default drive letter. Let's say for this example, drive F:

2. Download and install the freeware utility SymLinker Which does nothing more than provide a GUI to the Windows command Mklink:

 

https://code.google.com/p/symlinker/

 

3. Copy the entire Microsoft Flight Simulator X folder to drive F:\FSX

4. Rename the original Microsoft Flight Simulator X folder to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X.old.

5. Run Symlinker and create a "Folder Symbolic Link" from C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X to F:\FSX. The symbolic link type should be a "Directory Junction". Don't forget to hit the Create Link button.

6. Run FSX. If you feel comfortable with this approach, you can delete C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X.old. I normally just keep it as a backup and you can always undo the whole process, if needed.

 

  

Here's a screen capture of the above approach using SymLink:

 

My experience with FSX is that you can copy the whole FSX folder to the new drive and

then rename the drives so that the new drive has the name of the previous drive, like E:

or whatever it was called before.  That is all you need to do.

 

No idea about P3D.

 

If you do it this way (it does work for the most part) you'll also want to use a utility to make sure the volume ID of the new drive (looks something like "9EA4-0DA6") is the same as the old one, or some software that would otherwise run will require reinstallation.  There are a couple utilities out there to do this.  Another option I have used successfully is to use the clone disk feature of O&O DiskImage, which will create an identical virtual drive on another HDD/SSD--then you just reassign the drive letters so that the new drive has the letter of the old one.

 

If you are using software that uses the Virtuali Addonmanager, you'll want to deactivate each add-on that uses it (i.e. FSDreamTeam, Flightbeam, Cloud9 etc) before making the swap, and then reactivate it once the new drive is running, otherwise it detects that the software is running on a new drive and it will use up another one of your activations.

 

Regards

cant you just image the disk with something like Total recovery Pro or other disk imaging software then restore to a new SSD, surely P3D V2 would still work or do you actually need to change the volume ID to match the old drive so P3D and addons are still activated

If you do it this way (it does work for the most part) you'll also want to use a utility to make sure the volume ID of the new drive (looks something like "9EA4-0DA6") is the same as the old one, or some software that would otherwise run will require reinstallation.  There are a couple utilities out there to do this.  Another option I have used successfully is to use the clone disk feature of O&O DiskImage, which will create an identical virtual drive on another HDD/SSD--then you just reassign the drive letters so that the new drive has the letter of the old one.

 

If you are using software that uses the Virtuali Addonmanager, you'll want to deactivate each add-on that uses it (i.e. FSDreamTeam, Flightbeam, Cloud9 etc) before making the swap, and then reactivate it once the new drive is running, otherwise it detects that the software is running on a new drive and it will use up another one of your activations.

 

Regards

I cloned my C\: drive to a SSD using Acronis. Easy peasy. Everything ran without problems. I assumed I could use the same method to clone my flight sim drive. You have me concerned about the necessity of changing the disk volume ID.  There are several utilities that claim to do that. Which have you had success with?

I cloned my C\: drive to a SSD using Acronis. Easy peasy. Everything ran without problems. I assumed I could use the same method to clone my flight sim drive. You have me concerned about the necessity of changing the disk volume ID.  There are several utilities that claim to do that. Which have you had success with?

 

I think the "clone" feature on most of the drive imaging programs copies the volume serial number over for you.  The volume s/n is created by the OS when the drive is formatted...so if you do a restore (vs a "clone") from an image to a different device that's already formatted, odds are it will have a different serial number.

 

You can check the ID by opening a command window and running the command "vol x:" where x is your drive letter.

 

I use Mark Russinovich's VolumeID utility, part of the Sysinternals utilities, to change it if needed.

 

Regards