Removed a Hard drive from PC and keeping it.

skylight

We have an old PC that we have stripped (ie given MIL the ram etc) and OH has kept the hard drive. He bought a casing for it and plugged it into the laptop and its recognised AOK and we can see all files etc.

The question is, is there anything that we need to keep on this hard drive to ensure it works, or can we just delete everything off it (which is all the old stuff that ran the PC it came from).

anewman

If you want to keep it as file storage only, and have no files left you want to keep on it, formatting the drive is best - although you can safely delete everything it will let you.

If you want to be able to re-insert the hard disc into a PC and be able to, for example, run windows from it, then there's quite a lot that shouldn't be deleted

culpepper

it doesnt need to have anything on it to work so long as it is only going to be a used for storage and not to reboot the old pc in the future. Any files used to set up the old computer would have been specific to its hardware anyway so it wouldnt boot a different machine properly if it had run windows anyway.
We have several we have wiped and now use as storage drives.

skylight

Thats great thanks! We do not intend to re-use in a PC at any point, only use it for storage of our photos.

totalsolutions

As long as its not the only copy of your photos, 1 copy does not = a backup.
Also its an "old" drive and can fail any time soon. Scan it with Spinrite from https://www.grc.com not a free utility but does maintain all your hard drives. Before you wipe it back up any work/photos/documents first you never know!