seemlessly replacing a non-OS hard drive

[zoefschildpad]

One of my hard drives is failing, sometimes it isn't found when I boot my PC. I want to move all the files from it to a partition on a much newer hard drive, and I found a program to clone it which is running at the moment and the way I see it is that all I would need to do is to remove the old drive and change the drive letter for the new partition to the old one and Windows (I run windows 7) shouldn't even know anything happened.

It occurs to me that that might not be how it works. If I simply change the drive letter, does Windows try to "fix" links in the registry and shortcuts and the like? I have a lot of programs installed on that drive, I don't want to reinstall them if there is no need to.

[Vash The Stampede]

If the drive only has files and no OS, just plug in the drive. Reboot Windows a couple of times and then drag and drop the files over to the new drives. When done just remove the old drive and plug the new drive in the same cable. Drive letters should be the same.