erasing the old OS

hi,

how do you erase your old HDD if it has the OS on it when you upgrade to ssd? i have tried but the newly installed OS won't allow me to erase my old OS on my HDD. i want to use my HDD for storing photos. is there an app that will help me do that? thanks for your help.

cheerz.

rebel99 said:

hi,

how do you erase your old HDD if it has the OS on it when you upgrade to ssd? i have tried but the newly installed OS won't allow me to erase my old OS on my HDD. i want to use my HDD for storing photos. is there an app that will help me do that? thanks for your help.

cheerz.

Click to expand...

get a disk partitioning tool that will boot from a CD/DVD, there are many free ones out there, do a web search. Boot into the tool and you should be able to re-partition the disk if you like, reformat existing partitions, etc. Also turn off the 'active' or 'boot' bit that indicates the OS partition was a bootable partition, and it should look like a normal data partition.

Also, before doing this, use the Windows Disk Management utility to give meaningful names to your partitions. When you boot into the Linux-based DVD utilities it will often give your drives different letters than what Windows has assigned, so it can get confusing. You may also be able to use the Disk Management to do the other things you asked about, but if that doesn't work then go with the partitioning tools.

find under my computer and format it. then use in the case.

Assuming it is now D: just go to the command prompt and

format d:

If you don't care about losing all the data on the HDD then formatting is the simplest method.

But if you want to save the data and delete just the Windows directory it get a bit more challenging. As you found out, Windows will not delete a directory named Windows or System32 or a lot of other "sacred" names. There are a couple of ways to get around this.

1. Boot from your Windows installer DVD. One of the options you'll get to is Command Prompt. Choosing this will load a version of DOS (without Windows) and give you the c:\ prompt. From there you can switch to the HDD (probably e:\ if your system has a single optical drive) and from there you can delete whatever you want.

2. From Windows, install the Take Ownership command. The run that on the old Windows directory. After that you should be able to delete most everything. If some stuff is left behind try renaming it and then deleting it.

thanks for your advice! i think now i know how to go about it, or at least try most the good stuff you have suggested ;-)

cheerz.

I was interested to see this thread as that was what I was planning to do too. I have ordered my parts and software to add an ssd drive and put win 8.1 on it. I'll update my other thread when I get the stuff. But back to this thread...I assume you mean use the new OS to format the old drive, correct?

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