Beginner’s Guide — Install A New Hard Drive/SSD in Windows 10/8/7

In the following, you’ll learn a complete guide on how to install and set up a new hard drive or SSD on Windows 10/8/7 computer. If you are looking for a detailed tutorial, follow through this page to make the new drive work on your PC or laptop now.

Part 1. Install New Drive to PC or Laptop

After getting the new hard drive or new SSD home, you need to install it to your PC or laptop. You can follow through with this part to install the new drive. Here we will tell you the tools you need and all the detailed steps.

Tools You Need

Here is a preparation list of tools that you will need for installing the new disk on your PC or laptop:

• A screwdriver
• The new drive — a regular hard drive or SSD
• A SATA connection cable

Steps to Install The New Drive

As you know that due to the different designs of desktop and laptop, the ways to install a new hard drive are also dissimilar to some extent. Follow through the detailed steps and install the new disk on your computer now.

For PC:

Here, we will take a 2TB hard drive as an example to show you the full process of installing it into a desktop computer.

Step 1. Shut down your computer and take the new drive out of the drive case or box.

Step 2. Prepare the new drive.

If it’s a new hard drive, remove the screws on both sides of this disk.

And slide the drive bays into the screw holes on both sides of the new drive.В

If it’s an SSD, you will need to add a special mounting slot or a drive adapter to fit in 3.5 slots with screws like this:

Step 3. Remove the desktop computer case.В

If it’s locked by screws, remove them with your screwdriver.

Step 4. Slide your new drive into the computer case next to your old drive.

Step 5. Connect the new drive to your computer motherboard with the SATA cable and plug in a power cable to power on the drive.В

Step 6. Close up your computer case and reboot it.В

For Laptop:

Nowadays some new laptops support adding two or more hard drives. While most old laptops or some slim new laptops have only one hard drive bay.

If your laptop has another hard drive bay, you may easily insert the new drive in and make it work for you.

If your laptop has only one hard drive bay, you may have two options to install the new hard drive or SSD drive.

Option 1. Add 2nd HDD/SSD to Laptop By Replacing DVD or Blu-ray Drive

Here, we found a detailed and useful video tutorial that can help you add the second hard drive or SSD to the laptop by replacing DVD or Blu-ray drive.

Option 2. Replace Old Drive with New Drive on Laptop

This video shows you the process to replace an old laptop hard drive with an SSD:

As for the mentioned system clone tool, you may follow this link to download EaseUS Todo Backup for help.

Part 2. Set Up New Drive in Windows 10/8/7

After installing the new drive on your laptop, you can now move to the next part to set up your hard drive, making it work for you.

To save your time and energy, we’d like to recommend a reliable partition manager softwareВ — EaseUS Partition MasterВ to help you effectively initialize disk and partition hard drive with ease.

Key features of EaseUS Partition Master:

• Manage your computer partitions with simple clicks.
• Migrate OS to SSD to speed up Windows.
• Enable you to delete as well as create partitions.
• Smart adjust your drive size. Enlarge C drive in one-click.

Download EaseUS Partition Master now and follow the guide below to manage your new drive.

Go through the next two stages to make the new drive work for you:

# 1. Initialize Disk to MBR or GPT

Assume that the installed new drive is now unallocated on your computer or laptop, you’ll need to initialize it first.

EaseUS Partition Master will help you make your new hard drive readable in only 3 steps:

Step 1. Open EaseUS Partition Master. Connect the hard drive or SSD to PC.

Right-click the target HDD or SSD and select «Initialize to MBR» or «Initialize to GPT» accordingly.

Fig 1. Initialize to MBR:

Fig 2. Initialize to GPT:

Step 2.В A pending operation of initializing disk to MBR or GPT disk will be added. Execute the operation and click «Apply».

# 2. Make Use of The New Hard Drive

If you plan to upgrade your system disk to the new drive, the Migrate OS feature of EaseUS Partition Master is a good choice. This video tells you how to do it:

If you plan to make the second hard drive as a data disk, you may apply the partition hard drive feature in this software to create new partitions with ease:

Step 1. Launch EaseUS Partition Master. On the main window, right-click on the unallocated space on your hard drive or external storage device and select «Create».

Step 2. Adjust the partition size, file system, label, etc. for the new partition and click «OK» to continue.

Step 3. Click on the «Execute Operation» button and create a new partition by clicking «Apply».

Watch the following video tutotial and learn how to create a partition in NTFS, FAT, or EXT file system.

Preparation. Choose Your New Hard Drive

If you have bought a new hard drive home, you may directly skip this part and follow the guide to install the new hard drive or SSD.

If you haven’t yet chosen a suitable drive, here below are some critical factors that may help you to decide which drive you would like to apply and install on your computer — a regular hard drive or an SSD disk.

1. The Price

If you don’t plan to offer too much money on purchasing a new disk, a regular hard drive will be your best shot. Compared to a regular hard drive, we know that although recently the price of SSD disk indeed goes down, yet a solid-state disk is still charging regular people quite a bunch of bucks.

2. Your Purpose

Another important factor that may affect your decision is to make clear about your purpose of installing a new drive — to Migrate OS or Increase Storage Capacity.

If your computer system performance degrades, your system hard drive is old, you will need to upgrade the system disk. Your wise choice is to get a new SSD disk.

If your computer hard drive is out of space for saving data, you will need to add a second hard drive into your computer as a data drive. In this case, all you need is a regular hard drive with enough storage capacity.

3. The SATA Interface

Usually, the number of SATA Interfaces on the motherboard of your computer decides how many hard drives that you can add to your computer.

If your computer or laptop only has a pair of SATA interfaces, we are very sorry that you can only install only one disk. It means that you will need to purchase a new and bigger drive to install on your PC:

• For less money with a bigger space, a normal hard drive is your best choice.
• For faster speed with bigger space, an SSD is for you.

You may refer to this link for more details between SSD and HDD: HDD vs SSD.

FAQs About Install A New Hard Drive

Some of you may still have questions about installing a new hard drive to your Desktop or Laptop. Here we gathered 5 top concerned questions and listed a brief answer to help you.

1. How do I set up a new hard drive?

First, use Disk Management or EaseUS Partition Master as shown in Part 2 on this page to initialize the new hard drive.

Next, you may use Disk Management or EaseUS Partition Master to create new partitions for usage.В

For upgrading the system disk, you may follow Migrate OS to SSD as a guide.

2. How do I install a new hard drive in Windows 10?

The process is similar to the provided process on this page:

• Prepare new hard drive, screwdriver, SATA cable > Shut down the computer
• Remove computer or laptop case > Insert the new hard drive
• Reboot PC and initialize hard drive > Partition hard drive or migrate OS with EaseUS Partition Master.

For a detailed guide, follow up provided guidelines on this page.

3. How to format a new hard drive?

When you first install a new hard drive, if it’s not initialized, the computer may not be able to detect it.

So your first job is to open Disk Management, locate and right-click on the new hard drive, select to initialize it. Then you can create partitions on it by right-clicking on the unallocated space and select to create new simple volumes.

After this, you can format the new hard drive by right-clicking to format the created partitions.

4. What to do after installing a new hard drive?

After you install a new hard drive, you may initialize it first in using Disk Management or partition manager software like EaseUS Partition Master recommended here.

Then you need to re-think your purpose of installing this drive.

• To extend storage capacity, you can create new partitions on the drive and move your data to the new disk.
• To upgrade the system disk, you will need to transfer the system to the new disk by using EaseUS Partition Master or other system migration tools.

How to install Windows 10 on second SSD or Hard drive

If you wish to install Windows 10 on a second SSD or Hard Drive, it is possible to do so. There are multiple reasons to do so. You may want to test out an unreleased version of Windows 10, or you want to have your copy of Windows 10 to which you can boot by plugging in and boot up. In this guide, we will share how to install Windows on a second SSD or HDD.

Install Windows 10 on second SSD or Hard Drive

To install Windows 10 on a second SSD or HDD, you will have to:

1. Create a new partition on the Second SSD or Harddrive
2. Create Windows 10 Bootable USB
3. Use the Custom Option when installing Windows 10

While you can, I would suggest that you not remove the external SSD or Hard Drive unless it is necessary. When you install Windows, the Bootloader will register the path of the installed OS. If it is missing, then it can be problematic. Also do not remove the OS from primary SSD or HD, especially if you plan to remove the second SSD and plan to use on a need per basis.

1] Create a new partition on the second SSD or Hard drive

Connect the secondary SSD or the hard drive to your computer. The computer should detect it immediately. We need to prepare a partition of the Secondary drive to install Windows. To get that done, we will use the built-in Disk Management Tool.

If there is data on the file, back up those files.

• Use Win+X simultaneously to bring up the Power Tasks Menu and from the options displayed, choose Computer Management.
• In Computer Management, you will find the Storage option. Under it, you will notice ‘Disk Management.’ Click to open it.
• If there is an existing volume, right-click on it and delete it.
• Now you will have unallocated storage. Right-click on it and then create a simple volume.

Make sure to choose a size of at least 50 GB for the primary partition. You can create extended partitions with the rest of the storage space. Now you are ready to install Windows 10.

2] Create Windows 10 Bootable USB

Download the latest ISO, and create a bootable USB. Next plug in the USB drive, and boot from it. You will have to change the Boot priority, so it boots from the USB drive instead of the default HDD.

3] Use the Custom Option to install on the new partition

When installing Windows 10 from the USB drive, choose the Custom option. When you use it, it gives you the option —Where do you want to install Windows?. Here you can select the partition you created in the above steps or choose the one entitled Unallocated Space. Windows installation will automatically activate the partition if necessary.

Here is a warning. While you can create and manage partitions from here, it’s easy to do it from the Disk Management tool as the interface is much cleaner. Not only you have a limited option, but the interface is restricted. There is also a chance that you may end up deleting the first drive partition if not appropriately managed.

Henceforth, the installation process should go through as usual. When the computer reboots, you will have the option to choose between the two operating systems. Both the SSD and HDD will be available in the OS’s, so you have complete access to the files.

We hope the guide to install Windows on 10 second SSD or HDD was easy to follow.

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

Don’t try to copy the old OS from the HDD, it is much better to clean install Windows 10 on the SSD

If you do not have Windows 10 Installation Media Click HERE to download the Media Creation Tool (Click on Download Tool Now), with that you can download the latest Windows 10 ISO (Select Create Installation Media for Another PC), you can create a bootable USB flash drive (min 4GB) using that tool or create the ISO file which you can later burn to DVD

Once you have the bootable installation media created:

1. Shut down your system. remove the old HDD and install the SSD (there should be only the SSD attached to your system during the installation process)
2. Insert the Bootable Installation Media
3. Go into your BIOS and if SATA Mode is not set to AHCI, change it
4. Change the boot order so the Installation Media is top of the boot order
5. Save changes to BIOS and Reboot your system
6. The Installation should start
7. During the installation process skip the steps which ask for a product key and select the option ‘I am Reinstalling Windows 10 on this PC’, and activation will not be an issue, your PC will have a digital entitlement stored on the Microsoft Servers
8. D uring the installation process, your system will reboot, at that point, you may need to go into your BIOS and change the boot order so your system boots from your Hard Drive, otherwise the installation may start all over again — do not remove the installation media at this point
9. When Window 10 has finished installing and the desktop appears, shut your system down
10. If you have a second HDD bay install the old HDD into it and start your system
11. Make sure you can see both drives in Windows File Explorer, if not you may need to restart a couple of times for Windows to recognise both drives
12. Install any required drivers (can be obtained from the support page on the Website of the manufacturer of your system
13. When your system is up and running,

• copy your data (files, images, music . . . etc.) from the old HDD into a temporary folder in the SSD
• format the old HDD and name it Data Drive
• copy the files back onto the old HDD
• Delete the temporary folder from the SSD

Power to the Developer!

MSI GV72 — 17.3″, i7-8750H (Hex Core), 32GB DDR4, 4GB GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, 256GB NVMe M2, 2TB HDD