How to Change Drives and Format the old Drive

[Treyman42]

I posted earlier about swapping to an SSD but I didn't want to lose the date on my old HDD. I decided to give up on that and did a clean start of windows on the HDD and formatted the SSD. SO I am back to square one. What I want to do now is be able to clone windows onto the SSD and then format the HDD. When I try to do this, the format option for the HDD is greyed out and not available to select. What do I need to do?

Update: The drive has been successfully cloned. I have the SSD connected to the SATA slot in the laptop and the HDD has been moved to a disk caddy. If I try to boot from the SSD with the HDD out of the computer, it says not bootable disk. If I put the HDD in the computer enter the BIOS and boot from the SSD again it boots fine. Why would this be?

 

[dexxterlab97]

Maybe try do a clean installation from SSD. You get to format HDD there too.

 

[Tradesman1]

Have you changed primary boot device in the bIOS to the SSD

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Treyman42,

I would agree with Treyman42. Make sure that your system boots from the SSD.
If you have already done that, then my suggestion would be to back up all the important data stored on the drives, take the HDD out of the system, perform a clean OS installation on the SSD -> reattach the HDD.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[Treyman42]

D_Know_WD That's what I tried to do. The problem is the computer will boot from the SSD fine when the HDD is installed. but if I remove the HDD and leave the SSD installed it says no bootable drive.

 

[ArtPog]

What likely happened is that following the (apparent) successful cloning operation from the HDD to the SSD you booted the PC with both disks connected. What sometimes occurs in that situation is that the System Reserved partition which contains a number of boot files remains on the source disk - in this case the HDD. So that when you now boot the to the OS residing on the cloned SSD the system will seek the SR partition on the HDD. So as long as the HDD is connected the system will boot to the HDD.

So if that is the cause of the problem you're experiencing it would be best if you would repeat the disk-cloning operation and immediately following that operation disconnect the HDD from the system and boot to the SSD as the only connected drive. In addition, it's best (in many cases involving a laptop/notebook) that the boot drive is installed in the HDD bay of the PC and not in the caddy. We have found that in some cases boot problems arise when the boot drive is installed in the caddy. And, of course, you'll check your BIOS to determine that the SSD is first in boot priority order.