Formatting old OS drive?

Hey, I recently installed a new OS on a SSD and after decided there is nothing useful left on my HDD which contained the old/original OS, I want to remove the old OS from that disk and format it so I can have a new clean disk to use with my new OS.

I tried formatting the disk from the "disk management" utility and it formatted the bit where the windows was installed. But when I try to delete the "System Reseved" partition of my old OS, it gives me this warning:
"The volume System Reserved (E:) is currently in use. To force the formatting of this volume click yes. WARNING: Forcing a format may cause unexpected errors in the application that is using this volume. Do you with to continue?"

I hit "No" because I was unsure if I should go ahead with this. When I was installing the OS on the SSD I made sure only the SSD was connected to the computer so that it wouldn't copy the system reserved files onto another disk and my computer works fine without the old HDD connected. I just wanna know what is the right way to go about formatting my old HDD to make it like a new HDD that I can use to store things on...

Here is a screenshot of my disk setup:


The Disk 2 is the HDD I want to erase... Thanks!

VistaKing said:

Looking at the image Disk 2 has your System Reserved partition which is an Active partition . Unplug all of your Hard Drives except for Disk 1 ( if that's the SSD drive ) and run the Startup repair at least 3 times restart in between the system repair to have Disk 2 be the Active drive .

Then you could use Diskpart to wipe Disk 2 or you could use DBAN .

I unplugged the Disk 2 and the system seems to be running fine although I don't see any "System Reserved" folder.

I don't understand how the system reserved folder went onto the Disk 2 when I had it unplugged all the time I was installing the new OS onto the SSD and updating windows and everything on it...

OK I ran the startup repair 3 times and it showed no errors. I think my system is recognising the old "system reserved" disk partition as the current one maybe?

Should I just use diskpart to wipe Disk 2??

Here is what diskmanagement looks like when i unplug the Drive 2 (HDD I want to erase)


I cannot make the Disk 1 Partition 1 inactive. The option is not active...

Bongo said:

Windows 7 disk management is not to good at doing things try Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition. and burn it to a CD and boot from it and made your changes.

Jerry

It would be nice if I could do it through windows and without downloading any extra software though... I just want to erase an HDD I had my old OS on to make it like new...

I did that and here's the screen shot:


To note disk 1 is the 500GB HDD on which I had my old OS. Also I seem to have noticed when I disconnect the old HDD, the pc runs fine but the "system reserved (E:)" drive is missing from my computer. Now I can't remember if there was one before when I first installed the OS on the SSD with no other HDDs connected. Although when installing windows 7 onto the SSD (which I did as a GPT drive), I did create a new system reserve partition. So my SSD had 3 paritions. Partition 1: System, Partition 2: MBR and Parition 3: Primary. I don't get it how the "System" partition disappeared from my SSD!!