[SOLVED] Can I just buy a new HD?

[bobdempsey]

Hello everyone,

My apologies if this question is in the wrong section.

A friend of mine gave me a dell optiplex tower. It works fine, but he's removed the hard drive to use elsewhere.

1. Is it as simple as purchasing and installing a hard drive and installing the OS?
2. Will I need to mess with the BIOS at all?

(I think he was dual booting linux and windows 10)

Thank you for the help.

 

[kanewolf]

Hello everyone,

My apologies if this question is in the wrong section.

A friend of mine gave me a dell optiplex tower. It works fine, but he's removed the hard drive to use elsewhere.

1. Is it as simple as purchasing and installing a hard drive and installing the OS?
2. Will I need to mess with the BIOS at all?

(I think he was dual booting linux and windows 10)

Thank you for the help.

You may need to purchase the OS in addition to the storage. Prices for SATA SSDs are low enough that a 500GB SATA SSD should be your goal.
Will you need to mess with the BIOS ??? Unknown. If you only have one drive connected it SHOULD pick it up as the boot drive, but resetting to defaults on the BIOS is never a bad thing.

 

[bobdempsey]

You may need to purchase the OS in addition to the storage. Prices for SATA SSDs are low enough that a 500GB SATA SSD should be your goal.
Will you need to mess with the BIOS ??? Unknown. If you only have one drive connected it SHOULD pick it up as the boot drive, but resetting to defaults on the BIOS is never a bad thing.

Hey thanks for the super fast reply @kanewolf

I have a windows 10 key ready to go.

I don't mind resetting the bios, or making sure the hd is recognized, but is there anything boot related in there that I'll have to mess with?

I can remember having problems with boot records and things like that when I've messed with things in the past. Granted that was a different scenario and a long time ago. I just want to make sure.

 

[kanewolf]

Hey thanks for the super fast reply.

I have a windows 10 key ready to go.

I don't mind resetting the bios, or making sure the hd is recognized, but is there anything boot related in there that I'll have to mess with?

I can remember having problems with boot records and things like that when I've messed with things in the past. Granted that was a different scenario and a long time ago. I just want to make sure.

Assuming you have a factory fresh disk (or SSD as I recommended) then follow the clean OS install tutorial -- https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-to-do-clean-installation-windows-10,36160.html You shouldn't have any boot issues. The drive has no boot records to get messed up.

 

[bobdempsey]

Assuming you have a factory fresh disk (or SSD as I recommended) then follow the clean OS install tutorial -- https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-to-do-clean-installation-windows-10,36160.html You shouldn't have any boot issues. The drive has no boot records to get messed up.

Thank you very much @kanewolf

If you don't mind, can you answer 1 more question for me?

I plan to install windows 10 on the HD I'll be purchasing, but it'd be nice to have linux as well.

I know there are plenty of dual boot tutorials, but I'd like to skip right past that and ask this.

If I install linux onto a new HD like we've talked about above, can I just select that HD via a temporary boot menu and load it as usual?

I'm trying to avoid any dual boot/boot record problems.

Thank you!

 

[kanewolf]

Thank you very much @kanewolf

If you don't mind, can you answer 1 more question for me?

I plan to install windows 10 on the HD I'll be purchasing, but it'd be nice to have linux as well.

I know there are plenty of dual boot tutorials, but I'd like to skip right past that and ask this.

If I install linux onto a new HD like we've talked about above, can I just select that HD via a temporary boot menu and load it as usual?

I'm trying to avoid any dual boot/boot record problems.

Thank you!

I don't have any dual boot hosts. I find single purpose configurations to be more reliable. If I want a Linux host, I will buy a raspberry PI ...

 

[bobdempsey]

I don't have any dual boot hosts. I find single purpose configurations to be more reliable. If I want a Linux host, I will buy a raspberry PI ...

Gotcha. Thanks for the help @kanewolf

 

[USAFRet]

I know there are plenty of dual boot tutorials, but I'd like to skip right past that and ask this.

If I install linux onto a new HD like we've talked about above, can I just select that HD via a temporary boot menu and load it as usual?

I've found Virtual Machine much better than a simple dualboot thing.

Linux runs in its own window. No need to restart.

I use VirtualBox for this.

Oracle VirtualBox

www.virtualbox.org

 

[SamirD]

Hey thanks for the super fast reply @kanewolf

I have a windows 10 key ready to go.

I don't mind resetting the bios, or making sure the hd is recognized, but is there anything boot related in there that I'll have to mess with?

I can remember having problems with boot records and things like that when I've messed with things in the past. Granted that was a different scenario and a long time ago. I just want to make sure.

If there is a COA sticker on the optiplex, more than likely an OS license is tied to the motherboard. As long as it's win7, from what I've read that activates to win10 as well. Or you can use your license--either way.

As far as booting, the only thing I've ever found on modern systems that is an issue with booting is if it is in ahci mode or not. I believe that there is an option in the Dell bios for this, and once you've installed your OS one way or the other, you can't change it without boot issues.

Since ssds are cheap, I would opt to get one for each OS, like 120gb for linux and 256/500 for windows. Then you simply choose on the bios boot menu and can set up a default. As mentioned previously, this is always the most reliable way since any mess up on the boot sector(s) can render the system unbootable.