Windows 10: Windows 10 Upgrade - Secondary drives formatting advice

Good day all, hope everyone is well! I'm getting ready to take the plunge and upgrade from Windows 7 to 10. Now the plan is to format my SSD with my OS and the like on but my question is will I have to format my two 1TB drives?

There's about 1.5TB's of stuff on them that I would like to keep as I have a download speed that can be likened to an injured snail. The bulk of the stuff on there is games from Steam, Uplay, Origin and Battle.net.

So, what's the best way to go about this? Will I encounter problems moving to 10 without reformatting all 3 drives? and will I have problems accessing all the games on the 2nd and 3rd drive given that Steam and the other game clients are all on the SSD and will need reinstalling after I format and upgrade?

Apologies for all the questions being lumped into one thread! Thanks in advance for any help! *Smile

:)

 

How do I Format a Seconday, Active HDD in Windows 10

Hi Alexander,

Thank you for posting in Microsoft community. I understand your concern and I am glad to assist you.

If you have system restore enabled on the secondary hard drive, disable it and try to re format it again. Also uncheck the "quick format" check box and try.

If the issue still persist, you may use a Windows 10 DVD or an installation media and try to format the secondary drive.

For reference:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-win_upgrade/formatting-during-upgrade-to-windows-10/3bf9c4c3-f119-490a-b67a-edc6ec8f32ca

(Credits: Andre Da Costa MVP)

Keep us updated on the issue. We are happy to help!

 

Formating drives in Windows 10

My experience with Format in Windows 10 has been expensive. After format the machine no longer recognizes the drive (BIOS sees it; Windows 10 says it is not usable).

Does the format function within Windows 10 format for FAT or FAT32?

Upgrading hardware (motherboard & CPU) and purchased OEM Windows 10. My plan was to use the old secondary (for file backup copies) drive as the new C: drive (using the old system drive as a drive for backup files).

The quickest way that I knew to clean up the secondary drive was to format the drive so I did that.

Then I disconnected the old C: drive; placed the OEM CD in the optical drive and attempted to install a 'clean' Windows 10 without success. Windows could not use the recently formatted drive.

I finally had to purchase a new hard drive to replace the unusable one.

I now have a cleanly installed Windows 10 and my backup drive has all of the old installation. Many files and folders there are owned by SYSTEM or TrustedInstaller and won't let us mere mortals delete them.

The easy solution would be to reformat D: but I don't want to have to buy more replacement hardware.

 

If you use the free Windows 10 upgrade, you must install it as an upgrade over your existing Win 7 installation. (I believe that you also have to keep files, settings, and applications.) If you don't do that, it won't activate.

Once you have activated one time, you may clean install and activate any time on the same hardware.

If you do a clean install of the OS, applications on other drives may or may not work, like for previous versions of Windows. Applications that use installers write stuff to the Windows Registry, which is lost when you clean install. Those applications may not run.

If you do a clean install, you won't need to format the non-OS disks, but you may need to re-install any applications that you have there.

My suggestion? See if the straight upgrade works OK.

 

I would also disconnect the other drives until after the upgrade.

 

Smashing, thanks for the help guys, I'll give that a go!