When upgrading your hard drive, you should hang on to your old one because a spare hard drive can be used for extra storage purposes.
To format your spare hard drive it must be attached to a computer in one way or another. It could be installed into your computer as a slave drive, or you can place it in an internal hard drive case.
Reasons why you would want to format your spare hard drive
- To clean the hard drive of all previous information and start a fresh.
- To recycle an old hard drive to use for storage.
- To get rid of corrupted files or viruses.
If your hard drive is not attached to anything
- Install it into your computer as a second hard drive How to install a hard drive
- Put it in an external USB hard disk case. What is an external hard drive?
Once your spare hard drive is installed in some way, it can be formatted from Windows XP or Vista.
If the spare hard drive is in attached in your computer as storage
If your hard drive is attached to your computer as a second hard drive, it is very easy to format. Because it does not hold the operating system, we can format it from My Computer.
- Go to the start menu at the bottom left of your desktop.
- Choose My Computer for Windows XP or Computer for Windows Vista.
- Right click on the hard drive you want to format.
- Please double check that you have the right hard drive.
- Choose Format from the menu. All data will be lost. The hard drive will be like brand new.
- After choosing to format you will be asked to reconfirm your decision.
Watch this video to see how to format your spare hard drive.
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Hello from Colombia, thamks for ur help
Please why can I not delete the folder WINDOWS from my slave hard drive? If I format my slave hard drive and delete that folder will I have conflicts with teh OS? Bye
If the folder is not in use and on a spare hard drive then it should be ok to format it.
@Mitz:
Not so! I have a hard drive on which I had Windows 7 32 bit. I installed Windows 7 64 bit on another drive for convenience as I did not want to over-write some of the programs. Now, apart from deleting all NON-SYSTEM files I am unable to format the hard drive [nor delete windows files] although it has no programs in use. The system boots using the 64 bit HDD and there has been no way to format the old 32bit HDD. I have tried external programs but so far even these are unable to format. The command prompt also fails in allowing it. I believe the problem is that Windows of whatever flavour sees that there are system files on the drive and therefore refuses to format – believing it will stop the system from working. Shows just how stupid Windows really is!!