How would I delete the OS from old cloned HDD?

artislee · 26 Jan 2017

Hello I recently upgraded my Dell inspiron 3650 to an SSD leaving me a 1TB drive to use as storage, which I did and it worked great for about 2 weeks and then i started to notice small glitches in my system until finally my Bluetooth just quit working all together. So after 4 hrs chatting with Dell support and resetting my PC and losing everything we finally figured out that it was the OS still on my old drive that was still trying to run so I opened my tower and unplugged the original 1TB and left only the SSD and now all is fine except I have 1TB of storage that I dont know how to clean so that I can use it. I am not worried about losing all data on the drive so hopefully that will make things easier. If anyone has any ideas all advice will be apreciated. Thanks in advance.

Samuria · 26 Jan 2017

It's simple enough delete all partitions create new ones format job done. If you have problems in Windows lots of free partitions software that boots from CD to do it

AddRAM · 26 Jan 2017

The best tool you could have :)

Bootable Partition Manager| MiniTool Partition Wizard Bootable Edition

Steve C · 27 Jan 2017

+1 for MiniTool Partition Wizard (MPW). I suspect the active partitions belonging to the old OS on your old HDD are causing problems. Use MPW to delete all partitions on the old drive, then create a new (or several new partitions) and format them. Ensure no partitions are active. Ensure you have backed up any data you want to keep from the old HDD before you wipe it!

topgundcp · 27 Jan 2017

@artislee
Since you don't care about the data on this disk. You don't need any third party software to accomplish this task.

Reconnect your 1TB HD, make sure that the SSD is set to first boot order in BIOS then boot up Windows.
To delete all partitions from the disk. Open Admin command (Win+X->Command Prompt (Admin)) and type:
diskpart
list disk ====> Take a note of disk # associated with the 1TB HDD
select disk # ====> replace # with disk # noted from above
clean
exit
Open disk management (Win+X->Disk Management), initialize it then format to be used as data disk.