Windows 10: How do I prevent Windows 10 from booting from an old installed drive

I upgraded from Win 7 to Win 10 some time ago, and recently the original hard drive refused to boot, apparently due to boot sector errors. I have installed a new hard drive and loaded Windows 10, and installed all required software. Although I have marked all partitions on both drives as inactive with exception of the windows partition on the new drive, I still receive a blue screen with 2 options for booting (from Disk 0 (the new drive) and also Disk 1. How can I eliminate this? Can I just delete the Windows partition on Disk 1 and this will solve the problem? I would like to keep the old drive and use it for backups.

When I do disconnect the old drive, the computer boots normally.

:)

 

Clean install of windows 10 OS on new SSD-best procedure for eliminating current windwos 10 OS on old hard drive

I want to do a clean install of Windows 10 OS on a new ssd and make this the boot drive. I would like to keep the old WD 1T hard drive as a storage drive. What is the best/easiest procedure for extracting the old windows 10 OS from the old hard drive.
I'm not sure that I know how to properly identify the OS files.

 

How do I set my new SSD as the only Boot/System drive?

I recently did the free upgrade and installed Windows 10 to a new SSD.

I then erroneously removed the old HDD which had Windows 7 on it.

I received an "unable to boot windows" error message upon start up.

So put the old HDD back in, hit F8, and was able to boot from the old HDD as normal.

I would like to remove this old HDD and have Windows only boot from the SSD, how would I do that?

Also this old drive is an IDE drive from the early 2000's and I don't want to have it in my system anymore.

Edit: I'm still getting the Windows cannot boot message each time I boot up and have to keep hitting F8 now to boot up. - Nevermind, fixed that; forgot to set the boot order back to the old drive in the Bios. Still want to get rid of this old drive, though
and only boot from the SSD.

 

Welcome to TenForums @LutzF

You should be able to delete the unwanted boot option using msconfig, option 3 in this tutorial shows how to get to msconfig.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...a.html#option3

 

Hi Bree

Thanks for the advice. I tried that but the "set as default" option is greyed out - it is already set as the default. This probably means that the default boot drive holds the active system flags. However, I still get the blue screen with boot options on booting. I would like to delete the unwanted windows partition on the old drive - is that now safe to do?

 

On the boot tab of msconfig, do you show more than one OS listed? If so, highlight the one that you do not want and click delete. Then save changes.

To determine which partitions you can safely delete, we need to see a screenshot of disk management with all of the columns widened so that we can see the data in the columns:
Disk Management - How to Post a Screenshot of

 

Thanks, that worked - all is ok now.