Can i swap between two (C:) drives

[Hampefan]

So i want to get a clean reinstall of windows, ive gotten my hand on a 2tb SSD which i would like to be my new (C:) drive (using hdd right now). However i know that i most likely will want something from my old drive later down the road that i wont remember to move over now. Can i therefor just keep the old drive around(not plugged in to the pc ofcourse) with all my old stuff on it and when the time comes i can just swap the two drives out in my system?

I know you can not do it the other way around, so 1 drive on two systems, but have found nothing about this.

 

Thanks in advance!

[LIGISTX]

11 minutes ago, Hampefan said:

So i want to get a clean reinstall of windows, ive gotten my hand on a 2tb SSD which i would like to be my new (C:) drive (using hdd right now). However i know that i most likely will want something from my old drive later down the road that i wont remember to move over now. Can i therefor just keep the old drive around(not plugged in to the pc ofcourse) with all my old stuff on it and when the time comes i can just swap the two drives out in my system?

I know you can not do it the other way around, so 1 drive on two systems, but have found nothing about this.

 

Thanks in advance!

You can just leave them both plugged in. As long as you set in BIOS to boot from the SSD, it will boot from the SSD and then once in windows you can access the old harddrive as if it was just a data drive. It may throw up some warnings about “need admin privileges to read this data”, but…. Your the admin of your PC, just hit yes or accept and you can have your old harddrives accessible just like it was a data drive or external drive. Once you know you have everything you need off of it, I would recommend formatting it just so you can have a clean HDD to start adding data to. 

[Sjaakie]

No problem. It guess it can become more of an issue with certain kinds of disk encryption but in general yes you can do this.

 

Indeed as @LIGISTXnotes just hook up the old drive, assign it a letter in the new OS and copy the files from there as needed.

[Hampefan]

Oh okay thanks, i have a suspicion i have some kind of virus on my current system so would like to keep them separated just to be safe but thanks anyways!

[Blue4130]

48 minutes ago, Hampefan said:

Oh okay thanks, i have a suspicion i have some kind of virus on my current system so would like to keep them separated just to be safe but thanks anyways!

Do you only have the c drive? If you have any other drives like a mass storage drive or USB sticks plugged in, then don't use the old (virus) drive until you properly clean it of viruses.