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Can I use an older hd as storage in new pc?

Ty_in_BC
By Ty_in_BC
in Storage Devices
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So I built a new computer maybe a year ago or so with a 500gig nvme hard drive with the intention of eventually buying a sata(?) hard drive for storage in the future. The pc I used to have still works, but I decided it never gets turned on anymore and I might as well just take the hard drive from it to use as my storage drive since it already has all the picture/document/music files that I'd want to transfer to a new storage drive anyway. 
The potential problem I'm guessing, is that the old pc was windows 7 while the new one is windows 10. I tried plugging the old hard drive in but it's not being recognized anywhere at all.
Is there some way I can use the old drive without having to reformat it and lose all my old data, or am I going to have to buy a new drive anyway and then figure out how to transfer all the files from the old to the new once it's in the new pc and formatted etc?

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For a non-OS drive it shouldn't really matter which OS you used before, the data isn't directly affected by that. You would only run into issues if it was a file system not recognized by Windows, for example EXT4 (a Linux partition type). Windows 10 should be able to read NTFS partitions created by Windows 7.

 

Does the drive show up if you open Disk Management? Are you sure it's plugged in correctly and the SATA port is working?

Remember to either quote or @mention others, so they are notified of your reply

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I do this all the time and I've never had any issues with the hard drive being recognized.  The only way you might not have a drive recognized is if it's dead.  Simple question, you have plugged the SATA cable in to the drive and motherboard and you have plugged in the appropriate power supply cable? If your PC is not recognizing the hard drive you cannot reformat it.

Workstation PC Specs: CPU - i7 8700K; MoBo - ASUS TUF Z390; RAM - 32GB Crucial; GPU - Gigabyte RTX 1660 Super; PSU - SeaSonic Focus GX 650; Storage - 500GB Samsung EVO, 3x2TB WD HDD;  Case - Fractal Designs R6; OS - Win10

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I have a 8 year old HDD in my current system, works fine

                          Ryzen 5800X3D(Because who doesn't like a phat stack of cache?) GPU - 7700Xt

                                                           X470 Strix f gaming, 32GB Corsair vengeance, WD Blue 500GB NVME-WD Blue2TB HDD, 700watts EVGA Br

 ~Extra L3 cache is exciting, every time you load up a new game or program you never know what your going to get, will it perform like a 5700x or are we beating the 14900k today? 😅~

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  • Author

Thank you for the replies. 
@EigenvektorThe drive doesn't show up at all in disk management, I haven't yet tried other ports but will give that a shot.

@Alan GSata cable is plugged in, and the power supply cable is also plugged in. 

The sata cable is a cable with 2 plugs, would it matter which plug I'm using? They're the same type of plug, I'm guessing it would just be for a second hard drive.

I'll try using a different sata port and see if it pops up.

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Well, just plugged it in to a different sata port and everything seems to be working fine. Strange. 
Thanks again!

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