Adding an extra hard drive to a computer.

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My old desktop computer got to acting crazy a few months ago and the local tech guy put a new solid state hard drive in it. It ran find for a while but started acting up again. I called my tech guy about it and his advice was replace the computer. In Feb. it would be 11 years old. So I bought a new Dell and have been running it for a couple of weeks. My question to you computer savy folks is, if I install my almost new drive out of my old computer is it a simple plug and play deal or will I need to change a lot of settings? I know there is a slot to put the drive in.
 
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My old desktop computer got to acting crazy a few months ago and the local tech guy put a new solid state hard drive in it. It ran find for a while but started acting up again. I called my tech guy about it and his advice was replace the computer. In Feb. it would be 11 years old. So I bought a new Dell and have been running it for a couple of weeks. My question to you computer savy folks is, if I install my almost new drive out of my old computer is it a simple plug and play deal or will I need to change a lot of settings? I know there is a slot to put the drive in.
If the drive from your old computer still has the old OS and machine configuration on it then you will need to wipe the drive , reformat and install the OS once you've installed it in your new computer or you can clone your current installation to the drive assuming you've the knowledge and ability to do so.
 
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If the drive from your old computer still has the old OS and machine configuration on it then you will need to wipe the drive , reformat and install the OS once you've installed it in your new computer or you can clone your current installation to the drive assuming you've the knowledge and ability to do so.
I may need to get my tech to do it. I have a lot of stuff on the old drive that I really don't want to chance losing. Thanks.
 
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I may need to get my tech to do it. I have a lot of stuff on the old drive that I really don't want to chance losing. Thanks.
You can totally put it into an enclosure and read / list the files if you want to get your documents off it. Assuming you didn't have bitlocker enabled .. But if you want to use it as secondary storage then you will still need to wipe it , reformat and partition. If you want to use it as a boot device then you will need to do what I mentioned earlier.
 
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You can totally put it into an enclosure and read / list the files if you want to get your documents off it. Assuming you didn't have bitlocker enabled .. But if you want to use it as secondary storage then you will still need to wipe it , reformat and partition. If you want to use it as a boot device then you will need to do what I mentioned earlier.
Thanks.
 
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I used to order external hard drive boxes. install my old drives inside them and presto.... mobile hard drive that plugs into a USB port. Cases were about ten bucks years ago. IF it has the OS on it. its just wastes space. But you can move the saved files to an internal drive and once safe format the external.
 
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I've installed new hard drives in computers before but, I've never added a second hard drive to one that was running a different version of Windows. The new computer is Windows 11 and the drive I want to add is Windows 10.
Do you know what type of drive is in the new computer? Is it about the size of a stick of gum or a deck of cards? Reason I ask is you can change which drive your system will boot off of in the UEFI (BIOS) that you can get into on system startup. You generally hit either the delete key or F2, just as the system is starting and keep hitting it until you get into the UEFI. You can also hit F8 on startup to select which drive you are going to boot off of, if that is the only thing you want to get into the UEFI for. If you aren't comfortable monkeying around with stuff in these places, I would have your tech guy pull off whatever files you want from the old drive and then format it for use as spare storage/backup.
 

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