SSD Replaced HDD, Can I used HDD as second drive?

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Hello,

First, a huge thanks to GroverH whose excellent documents enabled me to replace the original HDD in my HP Pavillion dv7 3080us Windows 7 64 bit notebook with a new 500 GB Crucial MX100 SSD. The SSD is working fine. The advice and help I received in this forum has been excellent.

The HP notebook has a second drive bay. Can I install the original HDD in that bay and use it for storage?

If so, can I do that without reformatting the drive? It has a boot partition on the original C drive which ahs Windows 7 installed.

I am not sure if it is OK to have two drives installed with boot partitions. But if I can leave the original HDD boot partition in place then if the SSD ever dies I can switch back to the HDD quickly, even if I have to relocate to the primary drive bay.

I'd like to use the original HDD mainly as a place to copy files as a quick backup in case the SSD goes down.

Thanks for your help.

Maurice

Sat, 08/23/2014 - 20:37
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Hi,
I've been down the road where you are. If the HDD physically fits and connects to a SATA connector and power, then yes you can have 2 drives. I have that on a desktop. If I understand correctly you would have 2 drives with Win 7 including the boot partitions. I had that for a short while also for experimenting. When you start up, you will get a choice of which drive from which to boot. I think there is maybe also a way of selecting a preferred drive that boots after 30 seconds, if you don't make a selection. But I think you're asking for troubles with a double boot system, unless it was necessary for for 2 different OSs, for example like XP and Win 7, in order to use older XP software that won't work on newer OSs. Windows OS and other updates I believe will only go to the drive that was used to boot the OS. I suggest you erase and format the HDD, suggest a full and not quick format since it's an HDD with a lot of bytes written (guessing you know that SSDs should only be quick formatted). Guessing a single partition is best, and just use it as a D data drive . In terms of back-ups, I keep current full back-ups of my C drive on the D data drive. I make a new one about every 3 days as they are very quick with an SSD for the C drive. I also keep older clean install back-ups on external USB drives that are usually powered off. Many users update full back-ups with incremental back-ups, but I like the simplicity of just working with full back-ups. Plus my data files don't change that much on a daily basis. I just back those up using Windows copy onto my external USB drivers, from time to time. If you need to, you can just recover your up to date C drive from the D data drive. If you do that, it's best to boot from a recovery disk (recovery CD, recovery USB, original software install CD) instead of using the TI console in the program, as it's less prone to recovery errors.

Sat, 08/23/2014 - 22:06
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If you boot with two OS drives, Windows will normally render one of them unbootable. You don't get to choose, and it could render your SSD unbootable.

So, sure you can add that HDD as another data drive. But, be safe and format it first.

Sat, 08/23/2014 - 22:22
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And I just thought of this idea. If you are very concerned about doing a restore from back-ups, or until you become confident with that, just remove the HDD with the OS and programs, and store it in a static protected envelope, and buy another HDD (or another SSD if you don't need a lot of space on the D drive-I did that-less power consumption for a laptop-I did it for quiet, and another reason-a story). Use the newly purchased drive as a data drive, and you would still have a C drive ready to go, albeit out of date with updates for all programs, anti-virus, etc, if your computer C drive suddenly dies.

Sat, 08/23/2014 - 22:31