hard drive help

[Zextrix]

i have a computer i dont use anymore it has a 500gb hard drive in it been thinking about putting it into my new computer along with the hard drive thats in it, the 500gb one has windows 7 on it and the 1tb one on my new computer has windows 8.1, do i just plug it in and start the computer back up or do i need to do anything else to wipe the 500gb one?

 

[Aytex]

Nope

1. Go to bios set your win 8.1 as your main boot drive

2. open up disc management and format that hard drive

[Samsterstorm]

Nope

1. Go to bios set your win 8.1 as your main boot drive

2. open up disc management and format that hard drive

+1, Sorted

[Zextrix]

okay so i am a rookie and how do i do that?

[Naeaes]

okay so i am a rookie and how do i do that?

 

 

All BIOS setups are different. Things are labeled differently and placed in different places. So without seeing what they're up against, even the most professional pro shouldn't go giving advice to this. I hate doing it on the phone and this is way worse. The problem is that since you don't know what you're doing and your helper can't see and guide you, you can in your scope really mess stuff up. Have it boot to USB only or set an under voltage to the CPU or turn off important functions like the LAN port and so on. Nothing that a pro couldn't fix but might overwhelm you. I don't mean any offence with this BTW.

 

Basically the gist of it is that if you just hook up the HDD and booted up, depending on the BIOS settings the computer might end up booting to the Windows 7 instead of the Win 8.1, maybe crash critically along the way and mess stuff up like corrupt data. That's what needs to be done in the BIOS; verify that it won't even try to boot the drive with the Win 7.

 

The other thing is that there is a master boot record (MBR) on both drives, or a more modern equivalent to that. MBR is kind of a glossary for the computer of what partitions you have and where. "Partition 101001 starts at sector 110010010 and ends at sector 111000100101 and so on." And since you would have two of those, it could cause problems. MBR can't simply be deleted, the partition it's on has to be removed. It can't be done in File Manager, only in Disk Manager.

 

I don't think I should say this but if you hooked up the 500GB drive after the computer was booted to the Win 8.1, there'd be no problem with potential booting of the Win 7 or the wrong MBR messing stuff up during that particular session. And as long as you didn't reboot the system you could even back up data from the old drive. You could then enter Disk Manager and remove all partitions (MBR included!) by hand and reboot the computer. On the next time it would enter Windows 8.1 it would say that the drive needs to be formatted for it to work. From then on It'd be business as usual. Bu do note this! Your computer would be on with the side panel open and you scrabbling around in there, which is plain stupid thing to do. You can't touch anything at all other than the connectors of the cables. So the safest bet is to screw it in place and hook up as much cables as possible beforehand. Either one of the two cables can be left out before starting but the skinnier one, the data cable, is easier to hook up on the fly. Do it at the disks end, not at the motherboard.

 

If this all sounds too risky, you're right. There are all sorts of hazards with static electricity, scratches, cables going the wrong way around while they're powered, shorts with tools and the nastiest of all: knuckles in the spinning fan blades.

 

Or take it to a shop. It'll cost like $15 if that.