Hooked up old hard drive on new computer. Bad idea?

Agahnim

Hi folks!

Like the title says, I stuck in my old hard drive from an older computer. It still had windows 7 on it (which I'm also currently running on my current machine) and now instead of one extra drive I have two, the extra drive and the system reserve from this old computer. Basically I'm wondering if it's safe to keep around or if I should take it out right away before the two versions of windows compete for dominance. Thanks for the help!

urahonky

If it's still booting from your newer HDD you're fine. It just appended that old one to the boot order. If something happened to your first HDD and it couldn't find Windows then it'd look at that old one.

SniperGuy

You can also run msconfig and look at the boot options to make sure they are booting in the right order, and check your motherboard BIOS to see if you can set the boot order. Otherwise nope, it'll just function as extra storage. I'm doing the same thing right now since I just popped an SSD in. Installed Windows on the SSD but it was still booting to the old drive until I switched the BIOS settings. I'd reformat it but a new build is happening soon so I'm waiting. But yeah, same deal. the old windows isn't going to wakeup mid game and yell at you or anything.

Bigity

When you are positive which one you are booting to, I'd go ahead and rename/delete the Windows folder on the old one - just for any confusion later on or if you have to boot into repair mode or something.