Computer and Software Support


Additional drives during install 

 

Some have more than one hard drive installed on their computer. Some have additional drives for storage and/or backup. With the introduction of SSD drives, that is becoming the norm. The SSD drive is installed and is designated the C Drive. It has the Operating system only. The user then has a regular drive installed to store their files such as documents, pictures, videos, music and such. Then some have another drive to back up the first main drive. Therefore they may have 3 or more hard drives installed on their computer.

The danger of having more than one hard drive during a reinstall is that it is easy to select the wrong drive during a clean reinstall of the operating system. If you do that, you can loose the files that you have installed on that drive.

To understand my point, here is a scenario

There is 3 drives in the computer

  1. SSD drive (looks like a laptop hard drive). The size is 1 Terabyte (or 1000 Gigabytes). It has the operating system on it. This is Drive C

  2. Files drive (a regular sized hard drive). The size is 1 Terabyte (or 1000 Gigabytes) This drive has the Documents, music, Desktop, Downloads, Pictures, and Video folders stored on it. This is Drive D (This is optional. You can have this on the C drive as well if there is enough room on C drive. SSD drives are expensive and many use smaller sized SSD to save money)

  3. Backup drive (a regular sized hard drive). The size is 500 Gigabytes. This drive makes a backup copy of  Drive D. This is Drive E (This is an optional drive)

The Operating system is on the SSD drive. However the SSD drive died and you have to replace the SSD. You didn't lose your files because it is on Drive D and backed up to Drive E as well. You installed the new SSD drive. Now you have to install the operating system on the new SSD drive. During the install of the operating system, it will ask you what drive you want to install the operating system. You will see something similar to this

Which drive you want to install on

  1000 GB
1000 GB
500 GB		  

Note: I think it gives it to you in Megabytes and not gigs but not positive.

You know you have two drives the same size and one smaller. You won't know which 1000 GB is the SSD drive. If you select the wrong 1000 GB, you will loose the files you have on the drive.

To protect yourself from accidentally deleting files, Open the computer, and disconnect all hard drive's cables to all hard drives except the drive you are putting the operating system on. In this example, it is an SSD drive that you are leaving connected but it can be a regular hard drive, depending on the setup. Here is instructions

When you are done installing windows, Go back and reconnect the cables to the other drives.

Once windows is done installing, you will need to point Documents, Desktop, Downloads, Music, Picture, and Video to drive D again to the existing location. Here is instructions to do that.