How to clean up secondary HDD with stuff on it

[sandwich1]

I have an SSD and a secondary 500 GB HDD that used to be my primary drive, so it has Windows and all my old stuff still on it. I'm kind of a noob, so is there a way to clean it up (I don't wanna fully reformat it, because I still have some important stuff, rather I just want to "clean it up") instead of the seemingly noobish method of deleting random folders.

Thanks in advance.

 

[bailojustin]

You can use disk management to look at the partitions and delete the boot mbr partition if your SSD will be your primary boot drive, this will leave your storage files unaltered.

 

[sandwich1]

Btw, my SSD is already installed and I'm running windows on the SSD. So I just need to clean up the secondary

 

[bailojustin]

Go to the control panel, system and security, then administrative tools, disk managment, or add/create partition. using this you will be able to see the partitions on your old drive, I would get all your important information that you want and transfer it to the SSD, then reformat your HDD. If you just want a good cleanup, Download Glary Utilities, use the 1 click maitnence, or go to advanced and you can use it to find duplicates, empty folders, and it will also show you the disk, and whats using up all the space, so you can decide what you want to get rid of to save more room. at the end of all this DEFRAG the HDD with glary, then wipe free space with glary, this will open any space that used to be where deleted files were, it gets rid of deleted files for good so they cant be restored.

 

[popatim]

If you have room, copy (not move) the important stuff to the ssd. Ideally you should have already have the important stuff backed up... but you don't so please consider that your hdd or ssd can break , losing all the data on them, at any time and without any warning. Even if you burnt he important stuff to a stack of dvd's - some backup is better than nothing.

Ok after you get it copied to your ssd, you can then do as bailojusting suggests and format the drive.
The easy way to get to diskmanagement is to run diskmgmt.msc.

If you dont have enough room on the SSD, then you will have to manually delete folders individually. If you hold down shift when you click /press Delete, it bypasses using the Recycle bin and you wont have to keep emptying that too.

And lastly a word of warning. If you installed the SSD OS with the hdd isntalled, windows likely wrote boot files to the hdd. You can test this by unplugging the hdd's data cable when the power is off and then try booting up. If the SSD cannot boot all by itself then you know this is what happened. Power off and reattach the hdd. Do not delete the boot partition on the hdd in this case. We can help you fix this problem if you have it later.