Windows 10: Can I make my new SSD a boot drive without formatting the hard drive?

An SSD was just recently installed into my laptop and in order to make the ssd the boot drive the store clerk said that they have to format the hard drive. They said I can move important files into the ssd then format the hard drive. Is there a way for me to make the ssd a boot drive without having to lose so many files and applications?

Edit: I forgot to mention that im hoping the apps would still be usable if there is a solution

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:)

 

Format SSD drive or any drive

Hi Thomas

Think of a hard drive or SSD as a book . . .

A Quick Format basically deletes the contents page (File Allocation Table), whereas a Long Format will also delete all the pages (Files)

If a quick format is taking 2 hours on your SSD and you are experiencing problems with Windows, when only performing a Quick Format, then I would suggest the formatting operation is not the problem, most likely that SSD has a problem. A Quick format on that
drive, should take approx. 10 minutes . . .

 

new ssd, installed win 10, first in boot order but still boots from old hard drive.

I have a pc with a standard hard drive running windows 10 just fine. I got a new SSD. I unplugged all the hard drives, installed the SSD and installed windows 10 on it. I would boot just fine. I then plugged the old hard drive back in thinking I
could switch between these boot drives using the bios boot order. I was able to switch back to booting from the hard drive but now when I change the boot order to the ssd first it always skips over it and boots the from the second option which is the old
hard drive. I thought hard drive data was just data and the bios could choose which drive to boot from but it doesn't. I can see that the old hard drive is listed as active in disk management. It seems like windows will mark only one hard drive as active
and the bios must boot from that no matter what the boot order is. Is that how it works? Is there a way to switch between booting from either drive without opening up the pc and unplugging the other drive each time?

 

new ssd, installed win 10, first in boot order but still boots from old hard drive.

It only shows the os on the previous hard drive and not the one on the ssd. I am confident that if I unplug the other hard drives it will boot from the ssd just fine as it did several times during setup. I did learn that I had to unplug all the other
drives when installing on the ssd as this is the only way the ssd would get the efi and recovery partition that a boot drive seem to need. Disk management also shows the ssd as a "basic data partition", but before I plugged the other hard drives back in it
was listed as a system, boot,.... partition.

It seems that having two windows installations on separate drives and switching between them isn't as simple as doing it with just the bios boot order.