Rebuild system- Major problem SOLVED

I am going to buy a new SSD for my C drive, but have never loaded from the OS up (clean install?). So, I'm in need of guidance. if these questions are dumb, I'm sorry in advance.
 
Where can I get a step by step for doing this?
Being that W10 was a free download, how would I get it since I have no OS to upgrade from?
Can I load SPLAT on this drive while it's on my current drive?
 
I'm fairly confident I can do it, but if there's any advice to keep me from making a wreck of it, by all means share... thanks
 

Is this an option for the new SSD build? I have the Product ID from my PC. I really wish I had become a tech - this stuff confuses the crap out of me.
 
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10?tduid=(a2c29b70c0c9d720d42d4ca7b29541c1)(256380)(2459594)(TnL5HPStwNw-ekQzHYJyASDquF1lv9PVnA)()
 
Must I uninstall Sonar on my current drive before I install to the new one? This process may take a good while, and i'd like to still be able to work.

I don't have the W7 key. it was oem from a studiocat purchase. Does my current W10 Product ID meet the criteria? I have been in hopes of finding a guide for Sonar user's to follow from start to finish for a clean  OS and SPLAT install on a new drive. If this all works for me, I am going to document and post my expedition.
 

jshep0102
I don't have the W7 key. it was oem from a studiocat purchase. Does my current W10 Product ID meet the criteria?

I am confused now, how did you get a W10 Key? If you upgraded from W7 on the PC we are talking about, then rolled back to W7 yes you can use that. The new W10 will automatically activate from the MS database.
 

It's a Product ID - is that the same? 3 groups of 5 numbers, last group of 5 is a Alpha/Numeric combo. I also have a cd key - 5 groups of 5 alpha/numeric.

It worked - yea! I have Win 10 on my Samsung SSD, and SPLAT loaded, too.
 
Bad news is RME 9632 or UAD card drivers load after installing them, rebooting, installing the card ( one at a time) and rebooting for drivers to load. BUT - they are still on my HDD, which is not connected to the system. Do I have to uninstall them first? I'm afraid to in case I won't have a system to work on.

I don't understand why you need to remove drivers from old HDD.
If the HDD will not boot, then boot the Win 10 SSD and hook up the HDD as a data only drive.
You should be able to read it even tho it will not boot. I think the drivers you mention are downloadable from the manf's sites.
 
Also, check the bios drive order when using multiple drives. It may be booting from something else when its says 'no OS'.

It prob put the w10 boot partition on the HDD since the SSD had the one partition AND another drive was available..
 
Disconnect all drives except the SSD that will get W10 installed.
Install W10, reconnect drives.
 
You should be able to repair W7 on the HDD from a w7 DVD or downloaded .iso .

What a hassle! Glad you got it going. A few observations, albeit too late (sorry, I'd missed the thread):
 
1. I would not use an SSD for my boot or swap devices, both of which are typically on drive C:. The advantage of an SSD is its blazing speed, but it has one disadvantage over Winchester drives: its storage capacity is slowly reduced over time, the rate of which depends on how often it's written to. If it hosts the swap drive, it'll get written to a LOT. 
 
2. But since you've already got the SSD in place as the boot device, you can alleviate this problem by moving the swap space to another disk. Don't worry about performance; your 16 GB of RAM will help assure that page faults are minimal. (You could even get another SSD and dedicate it to the swap file. It can be the smallest, cheapest one you can find.)
 
Windows 10 really buries this feature...go to the Advanced tab on the System control panel applet and click on Settings, then to the Advanced tab of that dialog and click on "Change" under "Virtual Memory". When you finally (whew) get to the Virtual Memory dialog, you can specify a different disk drive to host your VM paging device. 
 
3. I have to admit I've never replaced the C: drive with an SSD (which I'd be reluctant to do anyway), but I have had many occasions to replace the C: drive with another hard disk. Each time I've done that, I have kept the original drive installed under a different drive letter. There are several advantages to doing that. First, you have an alternate boot device ready in a pinch. Second, all your old files are there to be easily copied over to the new drive (you will always remember something you forgot to copy, sometimes months later). Third, once you're done with the old drive you can delete what's on it and use it for additional storage such as project and library backups, or to host the swap space.
 
4. There is very little advantage to using an SSD for drivers, or for anything else that loads once and stays resident in memory. We're talking about a couple milliseconds at boot time. If you have important files such as drivers on the old drive, it's perfectly OK to leave them there (unless you've had problems with the old drive and are no longer confident it's reliable).
 
Similarly, running SONAR from the old drive isn't a big deal, either. How long did it take to open SONAR on the hard drive with no project? 2 seconds? How many times a day do you do that? Once or twice? Is it worth the bother to save 2-4 seconds a day? Read one less forum post per day instead.
 
The big time savings is going to come from files you either read many times or are very large, e.g. project files and sample libraries. Those can be moved to the SSD, assuming it's big enough to hold them all. They do not need to be on the same drive as SONAR. 

Thanks very much for a wealth of valuable info, Dave. I understand your thoughts on use of SSD's as boot drives. Fortunately, this is 500GB and I'm pairing down what will live on it compared to it's predecessor.. I'm kinda shocked at how much it's impacted performance. I had a couple projects that were totally bogged down to the point it took more than 1 second to move focus from Track 1 to Track 2 with a mouse click. They wouldn't even play below 256. Now they play at 64 with no pops/clicks at all. And these projects took 3 minutes to load and 15 seconds now. Kick ass performance I'm glad to say is at my fingertips.
 
I did as you said you would in that I kept the original drive in place and I'm going back and forth in the BIOS to 'get my stuff'. It's taking forever to install and register everything. I'm glad I have zero need to open old files, as I'm positive there's no way it would all reconnect.
 
I may need to call on you should I have any difficulty doing the swap file thing you spoke of. That sounds very necessary. My next SSD will be for my 3/4 TB sample library collection. Again, thanks much, friend.

I didn't notice this when  I ran bootsect and got my new drive up and running. Am I to think thisis the boot part of my new drive? How do I 'connect' it to the new drive?" />