Converting windows fromatted drive into a storage drive?

[Black104]

I would like to convert my old hard drive that was used as my primary windows boot drive into a regular storage drive.
The plan is to use my new 120 gb SSD as my primary boot and use the old one as a fresh clean empty storage drive.

How would erase the windows format off the old one?

Oh and I'm using Windows 7 64bit Ultimate.

Thanks
Black

 

[razel]

Plug both in. Make sure your SSD is connected to the lowest numbered SATA port and controller so that your BIOS sees it 1st and attempts to boot off it 1st by default. Boot up off the Win 7 DVD and during the 'choose your disk portion' delete all partitions off both disks. Double check and make sure your SSD shows up as the 1st disk during that 'choose disk' screen. Now highlight your SSD as the disk you want to install to.

After you get to the desktop, go to 'disk manager' and add a partition and drive letter to your old drive. Have fun.

Alternately, what'd I do is just plug in the SSD into the lowest numbered SATA port and controller, but unplug your old drive. Install Win 7. When it's complete, shut down then plug in your old disk. It should then automatically add it which you then can feel free to format. In some configurations, adding in the old disk can interfere with bootup if you can any special boot manager.

 

[mv2devnull]

"fresh clean empty"

You probably don't write to raw block device from Windows nor
initialize a filesystem without partition table on the device.

Assuming that you are running your Windows from the SSD, go to
the Disk Manager, select each volume from the HDD and delete them.
Then create one partition spanning the whole disk and format it
as NTFS. That only leaves possible bootloader within MBR untouched,
but that should not matter.

 

[CZroe]

Always safest to connect externally after booting to your new drive. Once that is done, go to Disk Management, as stated, and delete the partitions. Create a new one of the desired format-no need to manually format it as a different step (mv2devnull forgets that things aren't as they once were ).

 

[code65536]

That only leaves possible bootloader within MBR untouched, but that should not matter.

I just run a disk-write test from a benchmarking program (e.g., AIDA64). You know, the type that gives you a gazillion warnings about how it will clobber any data on the drive. I only need to let it run for a few seconds--just enough to stomp out the stuff at the beginning like the MBR (so when you access the disk in the Disk Manager, it'll ask you to "initialize" the disk to either MBR or GPT).

 

[taltamir]

First set mobo to AHCI mode, not IDE

When installing windows, ALWAYS have only 1 drive connected, the drive on which you are installing windows.
Windows installer is notoriously bad at properly placing the bootloader and will split it across multiple drives, almost always, and entirely unnecessarily.

Once the installation is done, plug in the old HDD, make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the SSD. It will load the freshly installed windows copy.

Now right click on "computer" and select "manage", then select "disk management" on the left, then find your HDD. It will probably have a 100MB partition (if it doesn't skip this step). Delete the 100MB partition and extend the main partition to cover the free space.

You can also assign drive letters at the above location. Remove the drive letter for the DVD-ROM drive, assign D To your HDD, then assign E to the DVD-ROM.

Now go into the HDD via windows explorer. Delete the directory titled "Windows" and the directory titled "Program Files"