[SOLVED] Can i use my old hdd (with windows) in a new pc with an ssd as boot drive without wiping my hdd

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cjc08010801

Nov 3, 2018
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Can i use my old hdd (with windows) in a new pc with an ssd as boot drive without wiping my hdd and have my old files on my new pc when i build it
 
Solution
USAFRet
2 OS drives can be fine, if you know what you're doing, and if that is actually what you want.

I've seen many instances where it leads to confusion.

In an instance like this, connecting it after the OS is on the desired drive, and wiping it, is no problem.
Leaving it as is, if that is not what you want, can be confusing later down the road.
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Yes, sort of.
By "old files", what are you referring to? Any applications from that old drive with its OS won't work.

You're planning on doing a clean install on the SSD in this new system?
 
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In the title of your post you say "old hdd (with windows)". Does this mean it was a boot drive??? If so, the last thing you want to do is boot up your computer with 2 bootable drives attached ... windows can not handle that and you will be amazed at how screwed up your system will become.

So .... copy the files you want to some other storage devise ... reformat the hdd and then copy the files back. Again ... DO NOT BOOT with 2 bootable drives attached.
 
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Uh no , that's wrong. Two os drives in the machine is fine. You likely have in mind the scenario of an install with more than one drive attached. But having multiple drives is just a dual boot arrangement and works great. I have three !.
 
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2 OS drives can be fine, if you know what you're doing, and if that is actually what you want.

I've seen many instances where it leads to confusion.

In an instance like this, connecting it after the OS is on the desired drive, and wiping it, is no problem.
Leaving it as is, if that is not what you want, can be confusing later down the road.
 
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Solution
Luck has nothing to do with it.Dual booting from separate disks is a somewhat common situation now arising from cloning which is a relatively new technique and we been doing it here since then. I have never had anyone come back with issues. Have you have actually tried it ? Or can provide details on this supposed confusion you and others will experience " down the road"? Fears like this arose when windows was a floppy disk. Time to learn new tricks perhaps ?
 
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I have seen a few cases of confusion with this.

Guy clones his drive to a new one.
Leaves the old drive still in the system.
Uses the system as normal, completely ignoring the old drive.
Months pass.
Boots up one day, and "What??"
System looks like it did 6 months ago.
Initial thought was a virus, or some weirdness with an OS update.
Maybe somehow it rolled back to an earlier Restore Point.
The system was working perfectly, just "where's all my stuff?!?"
Took us 2 days to figure it out.

It was simply a bad SATA cable.
Upon booting up, the system could not read from the new drive he'd been using, so it dropped down to the next selection in the boot order, and booted right up. The old drive that hadn't been used for 6 months.
He had completely spaced out that it was still in there.
 
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Well now there is a nice case for indeed having a second installed OS disk (though some leave it off the machine entirely). Its a wonderful system back up, often a little OOD, but sure better than having to reinstall. This guy had just lost a cord connection but if there had been a virus, or power spike , and he'd lost the main drive, well gosh darn he had a comprehensive replacement on hand.

But that situation is not what you have bandied about . Your approach says the arrangement of a dual boot is inherently tricky and likely to cause problems which again, thx to your example, shows to be a boogie man, ie,no an issue at all.Six months without a problem ! and in the end the dual boot gave him an OS while you took two days to find a loose cable. Think he was happy to have that extra drive ?
 
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No, the issue was that it was hard to determine the actual problem.
Had there been only the one bootable OS drive in there, the problem may have been found a lot sooner.
"It doesn't work", instead of "It works, but not really"

A good backup routine is trivial to recover from, without having an actual bootable second drive in the system.
I had to recover from a dead drive just 2 days ago. Fire up Macrium, click click...done. The drive contents restored exactly as it was at 4AM that morning, when the nightly backup routine ran.

I'm not here to argue...just saying that there are few good reasons to have a fully bootable duplicate OS, and a few bad reasons.

Can it be done? Yes.
Would I do it? No.
Dualboot with 2 different OS's? Sure!


Oh, and *I* didn't take 2 days to find the issue. The very nature of the forum back and forth discussion, not knowing the backstory, and not having eyes on the system is what took 2 days.
I certainly did not know there was a second drive in there.
 
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