I'm upgrading my boot drive to an SSD and planning to use my current hard drive as extra storage. I need guidance on how to activate the HDD as a second drive. Specifically, I want to know if I can delete Windows and all its files from the HDD without losing any of my personal files stored on it.
3 Answers
I suggest following these steps:
1. Clone your existing data from the HDD to the SSD using free cloning software, which gives you a complete copy of everything.
2. Change your BIOS to boot from the SSD.
3. After you've confirmed everything is on the SSD properly, you can remove the boot partitions from the HDD and reformat it, turning it into a standard storage drive.
4. You can then easily transfer any data you want from the SSD to the HDD using drag and drop in Windows Explorer.
If cloning isn't your preference and you want to start fresh on the SSD, that's fine too, but you'll need to temporarily store your data somewhere else to clean the HDD.
To get started, make sure to set your new SSD as the primary boot device in the BIOS. This way, your computer will boot from the SSD instead of the HDD.
So if I reformat the drive, I basically have to move everything back after, right? Is there no way to just delete the Windows files and keep my personal files intact? I have close to 2TB of data, so that would save me a ton of time if I didn’t have to move it all back.
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