New
#1
New W10 Hard Drive advice, keeping W7 HD available ?
Hi.
I have W7 64 bit running on a WD 3.5” 500gb SATA internal drive, 5400RPM with 32MB Buffer, I wish to keep this drive and all its information available after a clean install of W10 64bit.
I have now purchased a new WD 1TB SATA drive, 7200RPM with 64MB buffer, on this drive I intend to put a clean install of W10 64bit. As I know from past problems there will always be problems with missing drivers etc when installing programs onto a new system, This is why I want my W7 drive available so I can copy information across if needed. However with MS licence rules I cannot have both W7 and W10 running together (Unless I want to purchase a new W10 Pro, which I don’t). I was not sure of my best options , but I was sure where to ask!
Not very knowledgeable on this but would it best to Copy my whole W7 drive to a spare HD partition? I have two external HD’s with plenty of space that I copy it to. Or, - and this may be a stupid idea but ignorance is bliss as they say – I noted, (when I formatted and partitioned into two 500GB drives on my old XP machine in readiness to install on my W7 PC) it needed to be ‘Activated’ in order to make it boot-able, so would changing my W7 HD to ‘Un-activated’ mean it would no longer boot and so I could leave it in place? Would this work in reverse if I wanted to go back to W7?
I guess life is never that easy though!
Your suggestions would be appreciated, I would also prefer to keep it as simple as possible. I have Partition Wizard to copy it, or is there something better, if so what? Should the destination partition be Logical or Primary? does it matter? That sort of thing would be a great help.
Many thanks.