Installing win 10 on second hdd and leaving win 7 on Drive 0 intact, for now

[Jonathan Fox]

I have a Dell Inspirion 3847 that is several years old. It has a 1Tb Drive (C&D, etc) on it. I have added a new 2Tb hdd to replace this original hdd and will install win 10 on it eventually when I have copied all my business and personal programs to it.
I have used win 7 to partition the new hdd with more than enough space to accommodate win 10 and naming it "F" drive.
I am curious as to the safest way to put win 10 on this second drive without the two OSs mixing, knowing that win 7 will eventually (?) be deleted--IF that is what I should do. I have bought a Full Home Version (usb) for the 2Tb drive.
Any suggestions and/or guidance?

 

[Wolfie]

HI

it depends on how you want to set up your partitions, the first thing you should do is read up on how to partition, make sure you back-up all your data before committing to partitioning in case things go wrong:

http://gparted.org/display-doc.php?name=help-manual

https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-partition-a-hard-drive-2626081

Free tool here:

http://gparted.org/

I hope it helps.

 

[Jonathan Fox]

I have a Dell Inspirion 3847 that is several years old. It has a 1Tb Drive (C&D, etc) on it. I have added a new 2Tb hdd to replace this original hdd and will install win 10 on it eventually when I have copied all my business and personal programs to it.
I have used win 7 to partition the new hdd with more than enough space to accommodate win 10 and naming it "F" drive.
I am curious as to the safest way to put win 10 on this second drive without the two OSs mixing, knowing that win 7 will eventually (?) be deleted--IF that is what I should do. I have bought a Full Home Version (usb) for the 2Tb drive.
Any suggestions and/or guidance?

Thank you for your help!
I researched how much to partition the new drive to accept Win 10 and have done so ---allocated 100 Gb for it. I think this enough.
My concern is loading the new OS and other data/programs on this second drive without involving/blending the primary drive and its Win 7. This OS will be deleted later. Can the primary drive see this loading of an OS and secondarily programs that I will add on the second drive that I have partitioned as "F"?

 

[Grizzly]

The only way I can think of is this:
Since you want to remove Windows 7 at some point, you need to install Windows 10 on the new drive without the old one being present. After the install you can add the old one again and move your files to the new drive.
That way if you delete Windows 7 from the old drive, The new drive with Windows 10 will not be affected since the boot files for Windows 10 are not on the old drive.
Now, to boot in Windows 7 you have different options:
1. you switch the data cable between the two making the old drive a primary again or
2. while starting the computer, going into the boot menu and choose the drive to boot from (I do not know right now which key to hit that will get you in the Boot menu, on some pc it is F9, ESC or F1).

As I said, this is the only way I can think of right now, there may be others...