[SOLVED] How to use HDD after cloning?

[XCtoTri]

Hi all,

A few years ago I bought a laptop that had a HDD and I upgraded it to an SSD. I am not sure exactly what the process was because I did not do it myself, my school IT did it.

Now I have built a new PC and took that SSD out of the laptop and put it in my new build, but want to use the old HDD for additional space. This is the HDD that had windows removed from it.

Can I just hook this HDD up to the new rig and it's all ready to go to use as storage only? Or do I have to do something with the partitions or something else to get it working?

Thanks in advance.

 

[popatim]

Cloning does not remove the contents of the source drive, it's a copy. So everything is still on the drive, or should be unless the school's IT erased it.

in the end, after you install the drive, you may need to acquire a sata cable to do that, you can run disk management (diskmgmt.msc) and delete all the partitions on the drive and then format it for use.

Do not get mixed up with the other drive.

If you have a friend with a USB drive dock, they can do this with that instead.

 

[XCtoTri]

Cloning does not remove the contents of the source drive, it's a copy. So everything is still on the drive, or should be unless the school's IT erased it.

in the end, after you install the drive, you may need to acquire a sata cable to do that, you can run disk management (diskmgmt.msc) and delete all the partitions on the drive and then format it for use.

Do not get mixed up with the other drive.

If you have a friend with a USB drive dock, they can do this with that instead.

Hi Popatim,

Thanks for your reply. I hooked it up with a data cable and with the PSU, and had no luck. It was read by the bios but in Drive Management it said that I had to initialize the drive, and that it could not read any of the allocated space. It then would not let me initialize the drive, and could not read it anywhere other than the Bios.

Do you know what else this could be? After some extensive research online it seems that the part may just be broken.

Thanks

 

[popatim]

You need to delete the exiting partitions on it by rt clicking them in the lower section of disk management and selecting Delete.
Once the drive is empty, rt click on the unallocated area and select intitialize. Go with the defaults except for the name (your choice) and letter you want to assign to it)

Or you could run Diskpart Clean on the drive. Please make very sure you select the correct disk.
https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/...-a-drive-through-the-command-prompt-005929en/