Booting with two HDDs, both have Win 7 installed


  1. ABC190
    Posts : 42
    Vista
       New #1

    Booting with two HDDs, both have Win 7 installed


    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?
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  3. gregrocker
    Posts : 50,642
       New #2

    If you had the old drive unplugged during install then the System Active flags should be on the new WIn7 or its boot partition signifying it is booting itself.

    Therefore all you need to do is plug back in the old drive, after removing everything you want, wipe it with Diskpart Clean Command to get it ready to repartition in Disk Mgmt.

    Just make sure the new HD remains set first to boot in BIOS setup.
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  4. madcratebuilder
    Posts : 1,045
    Win8/8.1,Win7-U64, Vista U64, uncounted Linux distor's
       New #3

    What the rocker said. BIOS priority should be the determining factor on what drive it boots from.
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