Windows 10: Windows installed recovery partition on second drive, now need 2 drives to boot

I was tossing out an old laptop so decided to put it's 1TB HDD in my desktop. I formatted the drive, but apparently that doesn't remove windows recovry partitions. Now I want to remove it to put in an SSD, but windows won't boot without it. I have tried reformatting it, using diskpart, etc. and I cannot find a solution. How can I fix this without reinstalling windows?

:)

 

W7 Hard drive partition issue

to get rid of that 100 meg windows partition that setup creates for you on a new install on a blank hdd:

- press shift+f10 when on the partition management screen in setup <-- this opens a command prompt
- diskpart <-- start the windows command line partition management tool
- list disk <--- list the installed hdds in this computer for the next step
- select disk 0 <- might have to replace 0 with the number of the correct disk
- clean <-- this will erase all data on the disk you selected one step up- dont use the wrong disk!
- create partition primary <- creates a primary partition taking up all space on the drive, adjust the command if necessary
- exit, exit to exit diskpart and the command prompt
- click refresh in partition manager and select your newly created partition and install to that

 

Partition or multiple hard drives?

As the title suggests. Is it worth installing say a 36GB drive for the OS soley or partitioning an existing larger drive with either 2 or more partitions? I am currently running Vista 32bit and want to try out 64bit and am sick of reformatting the whole drive. Any suggestions?

 

Installing windows from usb hard drive

You can install Windows on seperate partitions from an existing Windows install. The difference with doing it from the desktop is that you'll be able to select which OS you'd like to boot to, without entering bios at all...it will give you a list of each OS, and 30 seconds to choose(the time waiting before it automatically boots the first one on the list can be adjusted as well).


There was a time when I was running XP, Vista, and Win7, all off of the same drive, with each OS on it's own partition.