Solved Best way to plug in possibly defective drive

[DavidOdden]

I have a 500 Gb spinning drive which has Win7 installed, and was working fine until after I cloned it to a new SSD. When I cloned the drive, the HD was Drive 0 and the SSD was Drive 1; I used Macrium Reflect. Also, the SSD was installed in a NewmodeUS optical drive caddy (so from the BIOS perspective, it looks just like another hard drive, not a USB device). At the end of the process, there were some number of error messages (1, at least, from Macrium, and another from some Dell guardian program that pops up occasionally), and after that, clicking icons didn't do anything. After pulling the plug and rebooting, Windows partially started and then told me that my copy of Windows wasn't genuine, and I just had to turn the power off. After trying again, I took out the HD, and the SDD booted up find and everything is spiffy. I could just throw away the HD, but I'd like to use it.

I assume the problem connected to cloning is that I then had two disks claiming to be active and in generally claiming to be the same, so Windows freaked out. I can put the drive in the optical drive caddy and after booting up, I can plug in the caddy (it just slides in to the slot and clicks in): but is this dangerous? Or should I buy a USB drive enclosure and attach it that way (would that be less dangerous?) I assume that the drivers are installed the first time I plug the enclosure in even when there is no drive in it, but I don't know that that is so, so does anyone know? I'm hoping to avoid challenging Windows by the presence of two active partitions, assuming that's not something that Windows likes.

 

[AddRAM]

Why don`t you just format the hard drive so you can start using it ?

If windows won`t let you (because it`s marked Active) make and use a Partition Wizard Boot CD.

Bootable Partition Manger | MiniTool Partition Wizard Bootable Edition

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Since you now have the clone = which I have never done :/
I would expect it's time to remove the hdd and put the ssd where the hdd was.
That was the point correct to not use both at the same time ?

 

[cyclops]

USB and SATA device are hot swapable if you do it properly. Read the article associated to the link below.

hard drive - SATA hot plug has no effect in Windows - Super User

 

[DavidOdden]

Having acquired an enclosure that claims to be hot-swappable, I plugged it in empty thus introducing the interface to the system. Then I inserted the drive into the enclosure and plugged it in, and nothing happened (which is good). DM reported that the second drive was offline because of a signature collision. Interwebs instructions for reformatting or reinitializing don't work, because there's no option to format or initialize. But making the drive be online doesn't cause any explosions, and then I re-formatted it. At this point, I was able to stick in the optical caddy. My Dell-specific version makes no claim about being hot-swappable, but they generally claim to be, so I thought I'd take a chance and plug it in (no explosions or sparks). It didn't respond to the new drive (it already knew about the caddy), but after a reboot, it is recognized as a usable drive.