How to unmount secondary drive and mount it in another pc?

Arkas · 01 Sep 2021

I have 2 laptops, one has an i5/6 gen cpu and the newer one has an i7/8th gen cpu, it's a gaming laptop.
They both have 256GB SSD M2s and both support a secondary 2.5 inch ssd. The i5 one has a secondary 2.5 inch 1 TB Samsung Evo SSD. Can I just take out that second drive and put it on the newer laptop? Won't windows wonder what happened to it and crash?
What is the procedure to follow in this case? Is there a tutorial for this?
Thank you.
Both are running the latest Windows 10 Home and both have Nvidia dedicated GPUs.

dalchina · 01 Sep 2021

It depends what's on the 2nd disk. I'll assume in both cases the O/S is installed on the smaller SSD.

If your O/S is entirely on the smaller SSD, and the larger is only used for data, then removing it should not affect the O/S booting.

Only you know how you have configured these two. Easy way to know: remove it and see if the laptop boots.

You can of course check what partitions are on each disk using a partition manager.

No, no tutorial, as there's no one single common case.

AddRAM · 01 Sep 2021

If it`s Data, there should be no problem. You may or may not have to take ownership.

Arkas · 01 Sep 2021

Yes, on both laptops, the OS is on the 256GB SSD.
On the larger SSD, it has data mostly, with a couple of apps installed on it. I'll try removing it, hopefully it will work. Thanks.

Paul Black · 02 Sep 2021

Hello @Arkas,

If the Disk is just a Data Disk, there should NOT be any problems. Windows is very good at managing these sort of changes. If it has files that the OS needs to Boot from [ Bootloader etc for example ], or System files, then that is another matter.

As mentioned above, you might need to Take Ownership of the Disk . . .

> How to Change Owner of File, Folder, Drive, or Registry Key in Windows 10

I hope this helps.