Those are two practical methods and you can follow the tutorials to get the complete info. Or you can change the primary hard drive by migrating OS to another disk. To switch boot hard drive, or make the second hard drive as the primary drive, you can fresh or clean install Windows OS on the new SSD/HDD, or install Windows on a second drive.
How to change startup hard drive in Windows 11/10/8/7?
Besides that, another main reason for changing startup drive is to upgrade a slow hard disk to a faster SSD drive when your Windows OS is now installed on a mechanical traditional hard disk drive that tends to slow in accessing data.
How can I change the primary drive and make the second bigger SSD drive as the primary one? Anyone can help? Thank you, ”įrom the above user case, we can know that users might want to replace a smaller older hard drive with a bigger new hard drive when the current hard drive is almost full of system files, programs and other personal files.
I do not have the option to choose where they will be installed. So, I want to chang the local disk from C to D and installed Windows 10 on D drive. Currently, all new programs are getting installed by default on C drive. “I have a laptop with SSD 32 GB - C drive and I later added additional SSD with 240 GB D drive. When performance starts to drop below the average it has established for your drive, it will notify you of an impending hard drive failure.Ī number of Windows-based utilities are available that effectively provide a GUI front end to S.M.A.R.Why change primary hard drive in Windows 10/8/7?
S.M.A.R.T should be enabled when a hard disk drive is new since it is designed to monitor a hard disk drive over time and needs first to establish a baseline assessment of your drive\’s performance characteristics. When it is it will typically monitor the following: It needs to be enabled in your system BIOS. Today all major hard disk drive manufacturers support S.M.A.R.T.
Industry acceptance of PFA technology eventually led to S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) becoming the industry-standard reliability prediction indicator for both IDE/ATA and SCSI hard disk drives. These drives were equipped with Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA), an IBM-developed technology that periodically measured selected drive attributes and sent a warning message when a predefined threshold is exceeded. It\’s origins date from 1992, when IBM began shipping 3.5-inch hard disk drives that could actually predict their own failure – an industry first. S.M.A.R.T can usually be enabled via the Advanced BIOS Features category of the BIOS Setup. Save the settings and exit the setup routine, allowing the system to boot from the startup disk. It\’s not vital to do this right now, but if you do intend to use it, you should enable it before too long. If your hard disks and system BIOS are fairly recent, it\’s likely that they\’ll provide support for the S.M.A.R.T hard disk capability. To have the BIOS automatically detect the new drive and set its parameters you need to enter the Standard CMOS Setup category of the BIOS Setup and ensure that both the Primary IDE Master and Primary IDE Slave are set to Auto to autodetect the drives on startup. After the POST (Power On Self Test) process has started enter the system\’s CMOS setup routine as described in your system\’s documentation (normally by pressing the DEL, F1 or F2 key. Insert the MS-DOS startup disk in your floppy disk drive and power on your PC. Once the second hard drive is physically installed, you then need to let the computer\’s operating system and software know that it exists.