Problems with re-using old boot drive

[dkjones]

A while back I had upgraded my boot drive from an 80GB SSD to a 256GB SSD. I didn't re-use the drive right away because I did not have any more space for it (both MB and case). Recently, I have upgraded my system and wanted to use the drive. I am running windows 8 now and the drive has the original windows 7 boot on it (I had cloned the SSD when I swapped it out). I connected the old drive to the mb and while the system booted fine under the 256GB drive initially, when I went to windows explorer, and the old drive refreshed, the system froze. I think it had something to do with the old drive having the boot record still on it.

My question ultimately, is how do I wipe that drive so it does not have the boot record on it without having windows freeze up...

Thanks!

 

[kleinkinstein]

You start anew and wipe it fully with Dban. I clear the MBR on my drives before reinstalling, or switching OSes that are installed. I still use a program called gdisk on a bootable flash drive, which was originally part of Norton Ghost. The switch gdisk 2 /mbr does the trick, assuming 2 is the drive you plan to clear.

 

[KingFatty]

You may consider isolating the two drives. Keep the big boot drive and use the computer for a while, see if the problem comes back even with the smaller drive disconnected.

Also, not sure if Win 8 does this, but sometimes the boot information can be spread across multiple drives. So worst case scenario, you may need to reinstall with *only* one drive in the computer, to ensure that all boot information goes onto one drive only.

The reason I say this is I have my computer set to where I can choose to boot either from my SSD drive or my old spinning hard drive, because each drive has a complete set of boot files on it. I merely select which drive should be number 1 using the BIOS (setting the priority of drives under the SATA menu etc.). So because my computer has been fine running both drives like this, I suspect maybe your situation is a bit more complicated and may involve having stuff spread across both drives for both windows installs?

Regardless, to wipe the drive, you can use a tool like ccleaner to wipe the disk if you want to clear off your old data and make it safe from prying eyes to resell the disk etc. But just to clear the drive and keep it, you can do a simple deletion of the partition. That is available under the windows installation procedure, or you can choose to "manage computer" and go to the disk management to delete partition information.

 

[razel]

All you need to do is clear the partition table, but you need to boot into something to perform that. I assume your 80GB SSD is still bootable into windows with the 256GB SSD installed as a secondary? If so start that 80GB up, bring up command prompt as an administrator (by right clicking) and run diskpart with following commands:

list disk (take note of the disk # of your 256GB drive)
select disk # (where # is your 256GB drive)
list disk (double check that your 256GB drive is selected)
clean (clears the partition table and last MB or so of the drive)

Otherwise you can boot using the Windows DVD and after it's complete, get to the repair menu then press CTRL-F11 OR ALT-F11 OR CTRL-F10 to open a command prompt. Best of luck.

 

[Coup27]

All you need to do is clear the partition table, but you need to boot into something to perform that. I assume your 80GB SSD is still bootable into windows with the 256GB SSD installed as a secondary? If so start that 80GB up, bring up command prompt as an administrator (by right clicking) and run diskpart with following commands:

list disk (take note of the disk # of your 256GB drive)
select disk # (where # is your 256GB drive)
list disk (double check that your 256GB drive is selected)
clean (clears the partition table and last MB or so of the drive)

Otherwise you can boot using the Windows DVD and after it's complete, get to the repair menu then press CTRL-F11 OR ALT-F11 OR CTRL-F10 to open a command prompt. Best of luck.

These are both options. Or you could boot parted magic and run the secure erase feature or better still, install the Intel SSD toolbox and secure erase it from within your booted 256GB environment. This would be the best option IMO.

Don't listen to advice about DBAN, there is absolutely no need to write junk over the entire contents of an SSD. All you need is a secure erase command to wipe it entirely. This can be achieved either booting a Linux live CD, something like parted magic, or the Intel SSD toolbox can secure erase a secondary drive connected.