moving old hard drive to new build question

jacobk91

Honorable
Dec 12, 2013
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0
10,510
i have an older sata 2 hard drive with windows vista installed on it. im building a new computer that will have windows seven on it on a new drive, but i would like to use my old one as a secondary storage drive on my new build. How can i get vista off of that hard drive without losing all my files on it? I have 400gb of files that i cant afford to lose. or, do i even need to remove vista off of it and just make sure that the new build boots off the new drive?
 
Solution
Another alternative is, once you have the system built, to copy the files you don't want to lose to the new drive then format the old drive and then move the files you copied back to the old drive. This way you are sure you have wiped all unneeded files and will reclaim the most space on the drive. I strongly suggest you not add the second (old) drive until after you have installed Windows 7 on the new drive. You can put it in the machine but don't attach the data cable to the motherboard and the power connector to the drive until you have installed Windows on the new drive first.
you can delete your system files,os files,and any other unnecessary files manualy once it in your new build.having the operating system on the drive wont stop you from booting into your win7 drive. just set boot priority in the bios to boot from your new drive.
 
Another alternative is, once you have the system built, to copy the files you don't want to lose to the new drive then format the old drive and then move the files you copied back to the old drive. This way you are sure you have wiped all unneeded files and will reclaim the most space on the drive. I strongly suggest you not add the second (old) drive until after you have installed Windows 7 on the new drive. You can put it in the machine but don't attach the data cable to the motherboard and the power connector to the drive until you have installed Windows on the new drive first.
 
Solution