Booting with two HDDs, both have Win 7 installed

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Flogger23m

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Hello,

A couple of months back I got a new HDD. It cloned my old drive (boot drive with Win 7) to my new HDD, booted into Windows and reactivated it. I have since left the old HDD in the PC, but never plugged it back in. Now I want to reformat my old HDD into a data drive (which still has my Win 7 install, from 8 months back).

I figured I would simply plug it in, put it last in the BIOS boot priority, boot into Win 7 with my current HDD and then format the old drive from within Win 7. However, some people seem to indicate that this might cause issues and the wrong drive (the old one) may get booted into regardless of the BIOS settings which can cause issues with my other drive. So they suggested booting into my current drive and then hot plugging in the old drive, and then do the format.

Is such a problem actually common? Or am I rather safe with just connecting both up front and relying on the BIOS to get it right? Motherboard is an MSI Z87-G43 if it matters.
 
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Idk what "people" are talking about. Your method sounds fine to me. If you want to be real sure plug in only the old HDD, boot to a CD or thumb drive like "Ultimate Boot CD" and then format the old drive first.
 
Id guess both are Sata....easy way would be to plug in the other drive as the second drive, make sure that HDD is lower in the list than the new HDD (might be like Sata1, Sata2, etc)

Id assume you would recognize if you booted into the old HDD/OS install?
 
dbwillis said:
Id guess both are Sata....easy way would be to plug in the other drive as the second drive, make sure that HDD is lower in the list than the new HDD (might be like Sata1, Sata2, etc)

Id assume you would recognize if you booted into the old HDD/OS install?
Click to expand...

Certainly. Well, I guess that issue I was warned about is not very common so I will more than likely just set the old OS drive as the last option in boot priority, and then boot from my new drive to format it.

Though about hot plugging, I can remove/install the power cable + SATA cable on the fly when the PC is on for all internal SATA drives? Or are there motherboard limitations to this? I am using an MSI Z-87-G433. Or do you need a specialized "hot plug" bay that many companies sell?
 
you can leave the power in all the time, just plugging in the sata cable might be OK, BUT it might not be as well
 
Check that your current Windows install can boot without the other drive being present.
ie disconnect the drive you want to format and see if Windows still boots and behaves correctly.
 
Already done " have since left the old HDD in the PC, but never plugged it back in. "
 
Ok easiest way to handle this.

Plug both in, select your Boot List from the bios if want to be sure which device to boot from (its hte option that lets you select the device, without going into the bios).

boot into windows.. go into the old HDD and Remove the windows directory.. now reboot the PC and your PC will only boot correctly into the new drive.. now simply format and enjoy.

I just did this with my HDD to SSD conversion and went without a problem.. just remove the old windows folder and you'll then be sure it boots into the new one.

also in the disk manager, it will only show 1 BOOT,ACTIVE partition even if you have multiple drives that can be booted from. just use the disk manager to verify you are on the correct partition to format/erase etc..
 
Just set boot priority in the BIOS. I'm doing this now with several bootable drives in my machine.

/thread
 
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