How to move just windows 10 from hard drive to SSD but still use old harddrive?

hockey3761

Reputable
Oct 12, 2018
9
0
4,510
My hard drive has 700 gigs used and the SSD is 110 gigs of useable space. I want to make start up faster, along with some other programs, and used the hard drive to hold photos, videos, and other less essential items. I tried cloning just windows 10 but i end up cloning entire harddrive. So instead i tried loading up just the SSD and put windows on there, then connect my old hard drive but it doesnt recognize the hard drive. I am thinking the computer wants me to reformat the harddrive to recognize it which would wipe out my data. I made a copy of the old hard drive to a new hard drive since I think the old one is dying. However, I think my idea of putting windows on the SSD and trying to then connect the old harddrive was the wrong move...not sure where to go from here.

 

hockey3761

Reputable
Oct 12, 2018
9
0
4,510
Hey jay, I came back home and tried again. Using my ssd as my primary, I tried the old and new hard drive, and each time I turned on the computer, it only found the ssd. I disconnected the ssd and tried the old hard drive with windows and it turned on. So for some reason if my ssd is the primary harddrive it cannot find the regular old hard drive, it's not there as a drive option. What can I do to get my old hard drives, with all the data, readable when I use my ssd as my primary hard drive for windows?