Best way to reformat SSD and Hard drive on one PC?

rylant

Honorable
Oct 11, 2012
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0
10,510
Hello all. I have a PC which is about a year and a half old, and it is time for a complete reformat of the system. I have a 240 gb SSD which I use for windows, and a 3 tb hard drive which I use for data. I have reformatted systems before, but never when you are using an SSD and a data hard drive. I have backed up everything I want to keep and it is a Windows 7 professional OS. I would like to do a complete wipe of both drives.

Is there anything specific that I should take into consideration when reformatting both drives? I remember having issues before with the 3 tb drive only recognizing 2 tb because of something I did incorrectly when I first set up the system a year and a half ago. Also, should I reformat the 3 tb drive first, and then do a reformat and windows install on the SSD after?

Thanks folks,
Rylant
 
Connect only the ssd. Boot to windows os disk. Start the install, when windows ask where you want to put it and your ssd shows up, hit advanced and delete any partitions. Continue the install, windows will format. When done, connect 3tb drive. Go into disk management and delete any partitions on that drive. Create new partition and format GPT. Good luck!
 

Doramius

Distinguished
Mar 24, 2013
180
0
18,710
Sounds like your 3TB drive might be a RAID and it was set to a striping mode with parity. (Basically allows a drive to fail, and you can replace it without losing any data) If the RAID drive is already setup, then you should be able to complete your formats properly, as usual. It does not look like it should affect the size on the SSD through reformat.