I'm going to be buying a 1TB Hard Drive from Scan to install Windows 7 on and use as a primary drive, retiring my current primary into a downloads/storage drive. However, I want to preserve all the data currently stored on my CURRENT primary drive (the one which will become a storage drive). The problem I'm having is understanding this- if I install W7 onto my new drive, will the secondary drive get wiped? After I've installed W7 on the new drive I want to move my files such as music, pictures, etc. over to my new drive from the old one, and then format the old. What will happen to my boot manager in this process? How do I REMOVE W7 from a drive, instead of just formatting it? (I had a problem with formatting a Linux drive messing up some GRUB manager in the past- I don't know if Windows would have similar problems?) Sorry if my post is poorly worded- I'm not entirely sure of a better way to put my problem unfortunately. Thanks, MrBobandy.
Hey, Simple thing to do here really, unplug the current primary drive, plug in the new drive and install Windows 7, now you have a completely fresh install of Windows 7 on that drive, do all the updates etc, plug the original drive back in and boot up the pc making sure it boots to the clean install on the new disk (alternatively use a hdd caddy for this part so you don't have any risk of booting to the wrong drive), copy all your desired data from the old drive to the new one, format the old drive, move all the data (pics movies etc) back onto the old drive. Now you have one drive with a completely new install and one with all your data. This method is fairly fool proof so shouldn't risk formatting the wrong drive etc, however I would recommend ccleaner and maybe a defrag after moving all that data around Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk
Thanks a lot, I can now safely purchase the new drive without worrying about negative side effects This does seem like an awfully long route around although if it's entirely foolproof I guess that's good enough for me.
Its not really a long work around. I do it all the time - sod messing around with dual boot systems. If i want to install a different operating system on a different drive, i always follow this procedure, then if i want to boot into any legacy/different operating systems, i just choose a different boot device. This way, all the drives that i use for operating systems have a boot sector, which is only to boot the drive which it is on. In the passed by not doing it this way, I have somehow ended up with boot sectors on some drives and os's on other drives, due to the order the drives were cabled at the time of install etc (and through being a bit thick in the old days )
