reuse my old hdd

[joey151]

hey

so i'm buying parts for my first gaming pc,i am going to buy 1tb hdd,but i do own my current hdd with os in it,my question is can i reuse the hdd after deleting the os from it?and can i delete it completly while keeping my games and steam library?the internet in my country is really slow,so i don't really want to redownload my games,would take me weeks.or is there any dangerous or something

thanks

[VerticalDiscussions]

If you delete your drive, its everything. You cant recover an entire game from a recently formated drive, only small files, photos and non executable files generally.

[joey151]

what if i transfer all my files into the new HDD,then delete everything on the old and install a new os on it?

[Phate.exe]

Mount both drives in the case, don't hook up Sata/power to the old one.

 

Install OS on new drive, get computer reasonably set up with all drivers, steam install, etc.  Don't install any games yet.

 

Plug in Sata/Power to old drive, boot into bios to make sure you are still booting from your new HDD.

 

Navigate to steam directory on old drive, and copy any files that are obvious game installations to the steam directory on the new drive.  Find any game saves on your old drive and copy them to the appropriate locations on the new one.  Install games.  Steam will check which local content is already there, and only download anything that is missing.

 

Once you have whatever else you feel like migrated over to the new drive, you can either start deleting stuff manually or format/repartition the thing to have a blank slate for overflow media storage.

 

Your system won't really care that there's an entire OS installed on the old drive, since you aren't booting from it.