[SOLVED] Doing a fresh install. what to do with hard drive that has system partition on it?

[spnathan1]

I am going to do a fresh install of windows 10 because my system partition and boot drive are on different drives. the boot drive is my SSD but my system partition is on my HDD.

I am going to disconnect my HDD and only have the SSD connected when I install to stop this happening again.

My question is what do I do with the HDD that my system partition is on right now when I plug it back in after installing windows? Do I need to format the drive first?

 

[Colif]

It depends on your definitions.

What Windows calls the System partition is actually the partition that includes all the information needed for boot. The Boot partition is actually C.
Which is just confusing lol. Especially to people who came from MBR and who might think they need to make C active partition...

If hdd had C on it and you format the ssd, the hdd won't be able to boot at all afterwards so it being in PC won't do anything. Its up to you when you delete it.

If ssd had C on it and the hdd has the old system partition on it, then you would be best going into bios after its added to make sure its not listed in boot order.

 

[spnathan1]

It depends on your definitions.

What Windows calls the System partition is actually the partition that includes all the information needed for boot. The Boot partition is actually C.
Which is just confusing lol. Especially to people who came from MBR and who might think they need to make C active partition...

If hdd had C on it and you format the ssd, the hdd won't be able to boot at all afterwards so it being in PC won't do anything. Its up to you when you delete it.

If ssd had C on it and the hdd has the old system partition on it, then you would be best going into bios after its added to make sure its not listed in boot order.

Hi Thanks for your detailed answer. Here are the drives in diskmgmt

https://imgur.com/a/i5LhBuG

View: https://imgur.com/a/i5LhBuG

The SSD had c on it and the hdd has the old system partition. So I should go into BIOS after fresh installing and take the hdd out of the boot order right?

 

[Colif]

Yeah, just make sure its not listed so that pc doesn't try to boot off a non existent install.

At some stage you might want to delete that partition. Shame you only have the 1 partition on the hdd.
Not many people have a 1tb system partition. although when I first installed win 10, mine was 232gb as i only had 1 partition on drive as well

 

[SkyNetRising]

You can deactivate bootloader on HDD. It will not be bootable anymore.

diskpart​

list disk​

select disk 0​

(select HDD)​

list partition​

select partition 1​

(select 931GB partition)​

inactive​