Turning boot drive into data drive

[Vulkan HeStan]

I have a friend who is currently using a hard drive as his boot disk. I tried to get him to use an SSD instead, but he swapped back because his games/settings/etc weren't there

 

I was planning on using diskpart to remove the EFI partition so the hard drive would no longer act as the boot disk but the data was still accessible. Would this work? Would it stop the BIOS from trying to boot to the hard drive, or is there another approach I could take to turn the hard drive into a simple data disk without removing any of the existing data?

[bezza...]

3 minutes ago, Vulkan HeStan said:

I have a friend who is currently using a hard drive as his boot disk. I tried to get him to use an SSD instead, but he swapped back because his games/settings/etc weren't there

 

I was planning on using diskpart to remove the EFI partition so the hard drive would no longer act as the boot disk but the data was still accessible. Would this work? Would it stop the BIOS from trying to boot to the hard drive, or is there another approach I could take to turn the hard drive into a simple data disk without removing any of the existing data?

that could work or in the bios you could just change the boot priority

[Vulkan HeStan]

3 minutes ago, Tomberry said:

that could work or in the bios you could just change the boot priority

I also wanted to remove Windows files on the hard drive once I've confirmed Windows is set up on the SSD, so he only has access to his games and old documents. Removing the EFI would just mean, say after a CMOS reset, the BIOS wouldn't accidentally boot to the now corrupted Windows install on the hard drive

[bezza...]

5 minutes ago, Vulkan HeStan said:

I also wanted to remove Windows files on the hard drive once I've confirmed Windows is set up on the SSD, so he only has access to his games and old documents. Removing the EFI would just mean, say after a CMOS reset, the BIOS wouldn't accidentally boot to the now corrupted Windows install on the hard drive

yes you can do that.

[johnno23]

If he is using steam he can just redirect the library. The path that was on C is now on D he needs only to take 30 seconds to do this.

Most game launchers you can do this so he can use the SSD as boot drive and have the games with their settings where they are without any issues.