Is it ok to unplug old drives while fresh install ?

Lyetnel · October 10, 2017

Hello everyone.

I ll have my M.2 ssd in a couple of days. So i want to move my OS to the M.2 from the HDD.

Problem is that i do have 2 HDD and while formatting i usually scare the crap out just because of the data inside.

So my question is , if i unplug the HDD's while installing fresh OS, can it cause problem afterwards ? Because an old OS will be still there and the disk letter (C,D,E etc.) wont be synced and all that stuff.

Thanks.

A Silver · October 10, 2017

14 minutes ago, Lyetnel said:

Hello everyone.

I ll have my M.2 ssd in a couple of days. So i want to move my OS to the M.2 from the HDD.

Problem is that i do have 2 HDD and while formatting i usually scare the crap out just because of the data inside.

So my question is , if i unplug the HDD's while installing fresh OS, can it cause problem afterwards ? Because an old OS will be still there and the disk letter (C,D,E etc.) wont be synced and all that stuff.

Thanks.

I did something like this. I powered off my PC and unplugged my HDD. I then installed windows to the SDD and once that was done I shut down my PC again and plugged in the HDD again. You may need to go to the bios to make sure it boots from the SSD and not HDD. You will need to make the shortcuts to the programs manually but it should work. Some things may need to be reinstalled as for starwars battlefront (and other origin games) did not work. but all steam games and other programs worked fine. There may also be a 300mb or so partition which you can't remove without formatting the HDD, that will probably be called the D drive and the main storage will probably be the G drive.

mariushm · October 10, 2017

Yes, it's very OK.

Install with just the m.2 drive, then add the hard drives.

May need to go in Disk Management to set the right drive letters (like before you had SSD, except giving your old C: partition another letter)

Lyetnel · October 10, 2017

20 minutes ago, A Silver said:

I did something like this. I powered off my PC and unplugged my HDD. I then installed windows to the SDD and once that was done I shut down my PC again and plugged in the HDD again. You may need to go to the bios to make sure it boots from the SSD and not HDD. You will need to make the shortcuts to the programs manually but it should work. Some things may need to be reinstalled as for starwars battlefront (and other origin games) did not work. but all steam games and other programs worked fine. There may also be a 300mb or so partition which you can't remove without formatting the HDD, that will probably be called the D drive and the main storage will probably be the G drive.

I do not have any apps installed there so it should be fine.

4 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Yes, it's very OK.

Install with just the m.2 drive, then add the hard drives.

May need to go in Disk Management to set the right drive letters (like before you had SSD, except giving your old C: partition another letter)

But dont changing drive letters formats the data inside ? And after the plugging the hard drives, there will be 2 operating system too. I will just go in to drive management and format the old drive partition that has the OS, true ?

mariushm · October 10, 2017

No, in Disk Management (computer management > disk management in Windows 7, not sure in Windows 10 if it's the same) you can right click on partitions and assign drive letters as desired. Data is not affected in any way. You can even have partitions with multiple drive letters.

If you don't have files opened from those partitions, you can even change the drive letters on the fly, without having to restart your computer.