Question about unplugging boot drive

SammyGoad · October 8, 2016

So I got an ssd and cloned my os with Macrium Reflect. I've tired to boot from the ssd and it seemed to work but my hdd is still listed as boot drive in disk management. I want to unplug the old hdd and test out if the os clone took. Should I do this or will it mess something up? thoughts, comments feedback would be great!

Enderman · October 8, 2016

You can unplug drives while the PC is off.

kirashi · October 8, 2016

2 hours ago, SammyGoad said:

So I got an ssd and cloned my os with Macrium Reflect. I've tired to boot from the ssd and it seemed to work but my hdd is still listed as boot drive in disk management. I want to unplug the old hdd and test out if the os clone took. Should I do this or will it mess something up? thoughts, comments feedback would be great!

If you mean that Windows shows both the new SSD and your old HDD as being boot drives, this is normal.

Windows marks certain partitions as "boot" to prevent them from being deleted by accident by Disk Management.

Your motherboard determines which drive you actually boot from, so yes, it is safe to remove the other drive from your system when it's off.

I'd recommend the old pave n nuke (full format) if you intend to reuse it for storage.

Ingrid_W · October 9, 2016

Two ways to test if the cloning is successful, change the boot settings in BIOS and remove the old hard drive. Therefore, it won't mess up anything if you unplug the old one.

Since you have cloned the hard drive to SSD, if you want to use the old disk as the secondary storage, you have to format or wipe it. However, you have no way to do that under Windows environment because it still contains the system files. I would recommend you to wipe it in Windows PE mode using Aomei Partition Assistant. It is free and it will do that automatically. Kind regards.

SpaceGhostC2C · October 9, 2016

1 hour ago, Ingrid_W said:

Two ways to test if the cloning is successful, change the boot settings in BIOS and remove the old hard drive. Therefore, it won't mess up anything if you unplug the old one.

Since you have cloned the hard drive to SSD, if you want to use the old disk as the secondary storage, you have to format or wipe it. However, you have no way to do that under Windows environment because it still contains the system files. I would recommend you to wipe it in Windows PE mode using Aomei Partition Assistant. It is free and it will do that automatically. Kind regards.

But once you boot from the SSD you can wipe any partition in the old drive without problem. Just need to make sure the MBR got into the new drive as well, but even if not it can be fixed ex-post.