How to remove old windows files from old HDD

[Jester196]

Hi guys, recently my Windows 8 had a big crash and Microsoft said that my only opinion to reinstall it and lose all my files. So I reinstalled it but took the opportunity to install on an SSD. Its all installed and working great, the SSD makes a huge difference to my boot time and system speed, but the old Windows files are still on my old HDD.

Is it safe/okay to remove these files and if so is there a certain way to go about this. I just don't want mess anything up.

Thanks.

[Shroomster]

Format the drive if possible.

[Speedbird]

Format the drive if possible.

Agree on that.

 

If you have any files on it, back them up to an external hard drive or the Cloud.

[Fulgrim]

Possible idea?

 

Shrink the partition on the old hdd, then with the freed space make a 2nd partition. Cut & paste the files you wish to keep into the new partition. If you run out of space in the new partition, shrink the original partition down now you've moved the files over, then resize the new one and make it bigger. Rinse & repeat until you have all the files you wish to keep in the new partition. Then format the partition with Windows left on it that you wanna get rid of. Then delete that partition, and resize the new one to fit the whole drive.

 

It's awkward but it's one way to do it, if you lack a spare drive to transfer stuff onto. If you do have another drive to transfer your files onto, that would be easier, but the method above works if you lack spare drive to do this.

[Jester196]

Agree on that.

 

If you have any files on it, back them up to an external hard drive or the Cloud.

  

Format the drive if possible.

The drives got about 60 games on so formatting would be a big inconvenience, but if I need to then I suppose it's not that bad, their all from steam, uplay and origin so easy to get back.

[UnknownEngineer]

You can safely format the entire disk. I recommend using disk manager to remove all the old partitions on it aswell. Make it just one large partition.

If you wan't to you can even save the data on the disk. Just delete what you want to delete and the expand the partition with all you data. You will need to delete the other partitions fist.

NOTE: I am pretty sure that simply choosing format from the file explorer will only affect the current partition. I wouldn't recommend using it, when I did it the old system reserved partition took the D letter.

EDIT: When I remove my old partition I didn't use disk manager, I used EaseUs Partition manager, not necessarily the best solution as disk manager can do everything it can. But I have used both and I can say that EaseUs was easier to use.

[Shroomster]

The drives got about 60 games on so formatting would be a big inconvenience, but if I need to then I suppose it's not that bad, their all from steam, uplay and origin so easy to get back.

You can put the disk into 2 partitions with the stuff you want on the other one and all deletable stuff on the other. Then format the other one and merge the 2 into 1.

[LogicalDrm]

Just delete the windows folders is one option. Sometimes windows gets annoying about deleting files that don't have "owner" anymore. Trick going around it is to make linux livecd and delete files with it.