delete windows on old drive

[Jharring3050]

i recently bought an ssd to put windows on, unfortunately i couldn't figure out how to move my pre existing windows to my ssd so i ended up just installing a new version of windows to my ssd but now i want to remove windows from my hard drive and only have the version on my ssd leaving my hard drive to just be a storage device. can anyone explain how i can do this?

[MedievalMatt]

12 minutes ago, Jharring3050 said:

i recently bought an ssd to put windows on, unfortunately i couldn't figure out how to move my pre existing windows to my ssd so i ended up just installing a new version of windows to my ssd but now i want to remove windows from my hard drive and only have the version on my ssd leaving my hard drive to just be a storage device. can anyone explain how i can do this?

Format the drive?

[Alex Atkin UK]

There is one caveat to formatting the drive, physically disconnect it first and make sure you can still boot.  Windows can on occasion prefer to put the boot files on the drive you originally had Windows on and then formatting could prevent booting.

 

This is especially true as to get all your space back on the HDD you not only need to format but also remove all the old Windows partitions such as EFI, recovery, etc.

[keskparane]

Takes more than a drive format to do it properly IMO.

If your not booting from it then I would remove the boot partitions. You can clean the drive with diskpart in admin command prompt (but be careful not to wipe your new drive.).