Can I install used HDD as second drive without formtting first /

elviseats

Hi
I am planning to install a second hard drive to my windows 10 Lenovo  (it has a spare slot available).

I  found a used HDD (windows 7) in my collection.Can I install that without formatting first ? Will it be recognized as a drive with a letter ? Can I then format and erase the new drive completely ? I'd like to completely erase the new drive and install a virtualbox,etc in that.

Am I thinking right or just clueless?

Many Thanks

EndlessWaves

The presence of absence of partitions and file systems won't affect whether the disk is picked up (or your ability to format it).

For it to be assigned a drive letter and the data accessible it does need to be formatted with a file system the OS recognises. That shouldn't be any problem in this case as I don't think Windows 7 supported anything Windows 10 doesn't.

elviseats

Many thanks for that!

NinjaMonkeyUK

Windows 7 and 10 both support NTFS so if you connect your old disk to Windows 10, it will automatically appear and you will even be able to see the files on your old Windows 7 installation.

Darren Heal

If you can't see the disk in File Explorer, go to Control Panel, type "disk management" in the box in the top right.  Something like "create and format partitions" will come up.  You can use this window to create a new volume, assign a drive letter, even format (and thus wipe) the disk if you want to.  Obviously don't do that if you want to keep Windows 7, though why anyone would...

Liftplus

I plugged in disks from different computers to mine many times and never had any problems with windows detecting them. Hell, i even plugged in disks with system partitions and they still were detected just fine without any problems.

Darren Heal

There are some drives, formatted as NTFS or FAT32 etc. that Windows will recognize instantaneously.  You may still have to assign a drive letter or something (which is akin to "mounting" a disk under UNIX, for example), but other than that you'll be good to go.  If, however, the disc has previously been formatted for, I dunno, a flavor of LINUX, UNIX, VMS or Apple, that Windows doesn't recognize, or if the disk has been used in a proprietary RAID array, for example, you may need to jump through a couple more hoops first.  Also, it depends on whether you want to salvage the data on the disk or just wipe it and use it afresh.

One other point, if an old disk has an operating system on it, you can either keep it and play with choosing the OS you want on boot (a lot of people who dabble in LINUX but need to keep using Windows do this, for example), or it may interfere and give you Windows 7 when all you ever want is Windows 10.

And why anyone would want to keep using Windows 7 is anyone's guess.... (said yours truly who still handwrites with a fountain pen....)