[SOLVED] Reusing Hard Drives

[Chaldo1]

I disassembled some old pc's of mine, and I'd like to use the space on their hard drives for my current pc. The old pc's run windows 7 and still have the os and files installed on the drives. I was wondering if it would work to simply plug the old drives into my windows 10 pc and clear them once it opened? Or would there be some kind of conflict between the different versions/hard drives?

 

[USAFRet]

As long as the boot order in the BIOS prevents trying to boot from those drives, no problem.

The easiest fastest way to wipe this is the commandline function diskpart, and the clean command.

 

[Chaldo1]

As long as the boot order in the BIOS prevents trying to boot from those drives, no problem.

The easiest fastest way to wipe this is the commandline function diskpart, and the clean command.

Will the boot order change when I install the old drives?

 

[USAFRet]

Will the boot order change when I install the old drives?

No.
But you DO need to verify in the BIOS as you turn the system on.

For situations like this, I highly value a USB SATA dock.
Put the old drive(s) in that, and don't even turn it on until the system is booted up from its normal drive.

 

[mdd1963]

Certainly if old drives containing WIn7 OS are installed and upon power up one sees a WIn7 boot sequence, one can safely assume something went amiss with the boot order?

Leap into the BIOS at first power up, and verify your desired drive is still at the top, and, all should be fine. Drives can then have old partition schemes deleted with disk management, and drives quick formatted within same.

 

[Chaldo1]

No.
But you DO need to verify in the BIOS as you turn the system on.

For situations like this, I highly value a USB SATA dock.
Put the old drive(s) in that, and don't even turn it on until the system is booted up from its normal drive.

I've got the boot menu here, but I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing. Is the list under "Boot Mode" the things that will boot up first?

I've also got this menu under "Hard Disk Drives"

 

[USAFRet]

Yes.
You should be OK.

As above...if it looks like a Windows 7 booting up, things went wrong...

 

[Chaldo1]

Yes.
You should be OK.

As above...if it looks like a Windows 7 booting up, things went wrong...

Thanks, all worked perfectly! Just waiting on the drives to wipe 😄