Built new pc with old hdd

Daltond55

Honorable
Mar 10, 2014
17
0
10,510
My old hardrive and disc drive was on a different computer with windows 8. I built a all new pc and used that old hdd, ram, and disc drive. I cut it on and it all appears to work and i downloaded a cpu driver and then realized I need to clear my hdd and do a clean install.

Problem is that it won't let me format my hdd beacuse the OS isn't activated i am guessing. So do I just buy windows 8 from store and insert that disc and it will walk me through it?

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Pentium G3420 3.2GHz Dual-Core Processor ($71.99 @ Mwave)
Motherboard: MSI H81M-P33 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($42.99 @ Newegg)
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB Video Card ($89.98 @ OutletPC)
Case: Sentey CS1-1398 PLUS ATX Mid Tower Case ($29.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair CX 430W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($49.44 @ Amazon)
Total: $284.39
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-03-10 11:31 EDT-0400)
 
"Problem is that it won't let me format my hdd beacuse the OS isn't activated i am guessing"

Activation has nothing to do with it. Think about it for a second or two. How can you expect to be able to format a hard drive using Windows when Windows is actually running off it? It's physically impossible.

The Windows installation DVD will allow you to format the old Windows partition prior to setting up Windows on it.
Make sure you do that otherwise you'll end up with the old & new Windows installation on the same disk.

You can even use the DVD to delete partitions & create new ones if you want to.