Sata drive from old PC as secondary

[TheLoneWolf293]

Hello, I know this sounds really stupid but hear me out... I am drowsy and sleepy right now so if this doesn't make sense I get it. About a year ago I got a PC that was a prebuilt from Best Buy. Long story short no matter what I did it bluescreened every 5 minutes so I went all out and blew 2000$ and a new custom PC. While I was messing around, I discovered that I have the same model of hard drives in both computers. They are both 1tb SATA drives. I have the space for it and I believe the cables, but I am wondering if I can salvage the hard drive from the old trashy PC and put it into my new one- adding to the storage or something. I don't know how though, because like I said, the old hard drive is from another computer, so it has windows 7 installed on it along with some files. I don't care about anything on that drive, since I didn't make any progress with it. My goal is to use the old drive for more storage in the new computer. Like I said, they both have windows 7 so I don't know if it would mess up anything, as they were both being used as primary hard drives. Anybody know what I should do? Do I have to wipe the old drive clean to use it in my new computer?

Thanks

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there.

Connect the drive and boot to Windows. The boot order priority shouldn't be changed by simply connecting another storage device, but if you want to be sure of that, you should go to your BIOS settings and check the boot priority menu and make sure that you current drive is the first booting option. By the way, chances are that even if you try to boot to Windows via your old HDD, it wouldn't be possible because it has already been configured for the hardware of a different system.

So once you've booted to Windows via your new drive and have the old one connected as well, just open Disk Management and repartition/reformat it as you see fit. Here's how to do that: How to partition and format a WD drive on Windows and macOS.

Hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Boogieman_WD

 

[TheLoneWolf293]

Hey there.

Connect the drive and boot to Windows. The boot order priority shouldn't be changed by simply connecting another storage device, but if you want to be sure of that, you should go to your BIOS settings and check the boot priority menu and make sure that you current drive is the first booting option. By the way, chances are that even if you try to boot to Windows via your old HDD, it wouldn't be possible because it has already been configured for the hardware of a different system.

So once you've booted to Windows via your new drive and have the old one connected as well, just open Disk Management and repartition/reformat it as you see fit. Here's how to do that: How to partition and format a WD drive on Windows and macOS.

Hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Boogieman_WD

Do I need to do anything to it before I take it out of the Old computer and put it into the new one? Like I said, it was the primary hard drive of another computer... thnx man

 

[Boogieman_WD]

It doesn't really matter that much if it was an OS drive or not. As long as you make sure that you've booted to Windows via your new drive, everything should be OK. You don't need to do anything with the old HDD before you disconnect it, unless you want to backup any data which you might need later, but you already mentioned that you don't care about any of them, so you're good to go.