Hello Traverserdave, welcome to PCHF.

hmmmm, no not really.

If you wanted to copy the entire contents, Vista, software and files from one drive to another, you can use a imaging software such as Acronis.

If you wanted to seperate the software, then your best bet would be to uninstall that software, and then re-install it on your new drive. With most software, it's not just the files you need to move, but the shortcuts and registry links that point to that particular location. Microsoft Office for example contains hundreds of registry links to that location which would be extreeeemly time consuming to change every single one, and potentially dangerous.

If you wanted to just move your files (documents, music, video's etc), then it's just a simple matter of right clicking on those files, click on Cut and then Paste them to your new drive.

Thanks for the advice mad monkey. I'll probably just do the latter, and move all my media and other large files over to the new drive.. I'm assuming that having the os on one drive and the media files on the other will speed up the computers response..

ek, is the second hard drive faster?

In terms of performance, by seperating your files, don't expect to see any noticeable increases. Saying that, every little helps but I'm sure that there are other area's of your PC that would help increase performance other than your HDD's.

The best thing you can do performance wise with two hard drives is to seperate your pagefile. You can do this quite easily:
- Go to My Computer, Control Panel followed by System.
- Click on the Advanced tab, followed by Settings under "Performance".
- Under the Advanced tab, click Change at the bottom.
- Select your new hard drive from the list and give it a page file, System manged size (or set your own), followed by Set.
- Click back on your own hard drive and click on No paging file, followed by Set.
- Finally restart your PC.

Say you have the OS on one HDD and games on another HDD. Assuming you want to have good performance from say a very new new game and your OS speed is satisfactory, would it still be best to have the pagefile on the game HDD?

I would say so yes, but your going to have little or no performance increase from installing a game on a seperate HDD.

EDIT: Marked as Answered.