Grant permissions to old (now secondary HDD), but still keep it for backup to run OS

[hidekelip]

Hello Tom's,

I looked for a solution to my particular question, but didn't come across any.

Sorry if the title is a bit confusing, so here it is:

I just bought an SSD, installed windows 7 pro on it (and also upgraded to windows 10 pro, which is pretty cool, btw!). My older drive is a WD Black 1TB drive, which had windows 7 pro, along with EVERYTHING I had (photos, music, videos etc.) and also the OS files, intact.

Now, I know there are methods to grant permissions to that secondary drive so I could read/write to it. My question is, if I do grant permissions to myself and take ownership of the drive, will I still be able to run windows 7 off that drive if I ever need to? I didn't delete system files on it for that reason, seeing as if I ever have an emergency and my SSD (with windows 10) isn't working, I could just boot from the old drive and run windows off of that.

Will granting permissions have any effect for that to happen without any issues? I also removed my password from the user account on the old drive, since I'm the only person who uses this computer.

Please share any experience on the subject if you've tried this before. I just don't want to lose the ability to use that old drive to boot from at a later date.

Thank you all! I use your forums all the time to troubleshoot. You guys are the best.

 

[hidekelip]

Nothing? I've yet to find an answer for this... =\

 

[Geekasaurus2]

What I found the problem is on these cases is the access to the "my documents" type folders from the new primary drive. You can always choose your boot drive in the BIOS and just go to your old Windows 7 with no problems.
If you are running into issue where you want to access or copy the actual documents from the old drive then here is what I did because the whole permissions thing was driving me bonkers.
I created new folders on my old drive called Docs, Music and Pictures. I then used a Linux live CD to copy "My Documents" "My Music" and "My Pictures" to the new folders I created. Those new folders don't have special permissions and I can access them from the new main drive. Sounds goofy but it works. If anyone has an easier solution to these permission issues I would also be interested in hearing about it.

 

[hidekelip]

Hmm.. did you grant yourself access for one folder at a time, or for the entire drive? I'm not entirely sure, but perhaps if you grant yourself access to the whole drive, you won't keep running into permission issues.

I'm glad you to give me some confidence in trying to boot from the second drive once I've granted permissions to myself. I might try it anyhow. I'll post any results/issues about it.

Thanks for the input.