Old hard drives in "new system".

so, my mobo/psu fried 90% of my PC (including 4 of my Hard drives except my main SSD somehow). I just rebuilt my PC with exact new RMA parts and was able to use my main drive to boot up just fine into windows 7. However my setup is as follows (just focusing on two drives) :

1. Main SSD for windows/a few games and light startup programs I use a lot

2. Large mechanical hard drive for pretty much everything else (the one that fried)

So obviously when I booted up with just my SSD a lot of icons/programs were unable to be found.

I also use symbolic linking for a lot of directories and programs between my mechanical and SSD

I'm in the process of getting back my mechanical Hard drive's PCB from being cloned by a service and am faced with two scenarios that I want help with.

Scenario # 1: the board swap works on the drive and I am able to clone it to a new drive (I bought an identical new drive) when I connect it and assign it the correct drive letter that it was originally (it was i) will this make it remember all my programs and bring back icons? And does it have to be in the same sata port even though it's a new mobo?

Scenario # 2: the PCB swap does not work and I confirm that the drive is 100% dead. Will running a registry cleaner clean out all the unrecognized icons and old program stuff left behind?? If so, what's the best program to use for this. I hear CCleaner is pretty crappy now days.

Thanks for any help.

Submitted September 30, 2017 at 07:48PM by Zalgo165 http://ift.tt/2fzHAEF