Moving hard drives over

[Lilninjsways]

i just built my grandpa a new pc and got him a 1 tb SSD (he wanted 1TB and very fast storage and he payed for it) but hes got another full HDD (1TB) of music and files and stuff and it also uses windows XP (which the new pc uses windows 10) can i just move it over and the stuffs all there or no?

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

Everything but the OS should work fine.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

5 minutes ago, Lilninjsways said:

i just built my grandpa a new pc and got him a 1 tb SSD (he wanted 1TB and very fast storage and he payed for it) but hes got another full HDD (1TB) of music and files and stuff and it also uses windows XP (which the new pc uses windows 10) can i just move it over and the stuffs all there or no?

You can plug the hard drive into the new system (making sure the system doesn't mistakenly boot off the old HDD) provided it's not IDE and just copy and paste the data using explorer. This will work for files, not so much for non-portable applications. 

[Lilninjsways]

2 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

You can plug the hard drive into the new system (making sure the system doesn't mistakenly boot off the old HDD) provided it's not IDE and just copy and paste the data using explorer. This will work for files, not so much for non-portable applications. 

so how do i remove the os and keep just the data on the old HDD

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

8 minutes ago, Lilninjsways said:

so how do i remove the os and keep just the data on the old HDD

What I would do is copy the files you want to keep, over to your new SSD temporary and then format the drive. Because the HDD has an OS on it already, Windows might not allow you to directly format it in Disk Management. There are commands you can do to force the format to complete, but I don't remember those off the top of my head. The work around would be to shut down the computer once you're done backing up the data, unplug your SSD (leaving only the old HDD plugged in), then boot into the installation media you used to install Windows 10. Similar to the installation process, choose custom installation and format and delete the partitions on the HDD. Once those are done, just cancel the installation and shut down the system. Plug the SSD back in and boot up the system normally. Once it's booted up, go into Disk Management again and then create a new partition on the HDD which should be un-allocated at this point. Once the partitions are made and the drive has a letter, it's good to go. Just copy back the data over to the HDD and change all the Library folder associations to the ones on the HDD to make everything seamless. I am assuming you want to use the HDD as mass storage. 

[MistaMac]

Find the folder: "This PC\Local Disk\Windows" on the drive you want to remove windows from. Delete the folder titled Windows straight from the disk. You will need administrator privileges to modify this folder.