Installed old windows vista or windows 7 laptop HDD as second storage drive on new pc

Adviceasker

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Jan 17, 2014
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So I installed an old 2.5" HDD from a laptop that broke several years back into my gaming pc as a second drive for more storage. I have several questions.

One, how can I find out if the OS on it is windows vista or windows 7? Two, can I load the OS from the old HDD to a usb drive that would allow me to install that version of windows to a different HDD not in this pc?

Three, before installing this "new" drive I had two storage options: local disk (C:) and DVD RW Drive (D:); now (after installing the other drive) I have the above mentioned drives as well as System (E:), Local disk (F:) (which seems to be the actual drive), and Recovery (G:). So, adding one HDD added 3 disk locations instead of 1. Also E: has 198mb of space, F: has 285gb, and G: has 12.4gb. So the last question is why were 3 drives added instead of 1 and can I delete the extra 2 drives/do they have an important purpose? This is what the drives are now: http://imageshack.com/a/img540/7213/6d6P8k.png Thanks in advance!
 
Solution
One - Locate \Windows\System32 folder on the "F:", and check the date of some executable, like cmd.exe You can judge the installation from here.

Two - No. You cannot make installable media from already-installed Windows.

Three - your laptop had it's disk partitioned in several partitions, used for system recovery. You can safely delete these partitions.
One - Locate \Windows\System32 folder on the "F:", and check the date of some executable, like cmd.exe You can judge the installation from here.

Two - No. You cannot make installable media from already-installed Windows.

Three - your laptop had it's disk partitioned in several partitions, used for system recovery. You can safely delete these partitions.
 
Solution

Adviceasker

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All of the executables I could find were dated 7-13-2009 or later, does that mean it's Windows 7? Also, is there any special thing I need to do to completely delete the drive? And is there any point in keeping Windows (7?) on it or do I have a choice? Haha by the way I didn't mean to put smiley faces next to each drive, I was putting the actual drive how it does it in windows because it does the letter than a colon.