Resolved using an "old" HDD can I ....

Greetings all,
I had a Dell Inspiron that went bad, I replaced it with an HP. I, being slightly paranoid and a bit of a packrat, pulled the HDD out before dumping the box. On a whim I plugged the HDD into an external docking station and lo & behold the data was there.
My question is this: Can I erase the OS from that HDD without effecting the rest of the data, (effectively gaining a 1 TB back-up drive?
(the prior machine would not boot up, and my geek buddy diagnosed a hardware issue not with the HDD, which test out fine in all the diagnostic HDD tests)

 

If the OS is on a separate partition just delete the partition, recreate it according to your needs & format it. If there is no separate partition, then it becomes a little tricky. You would have to delete various directories manually.

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...f-a-windows-operating-system-from-a-partition
Delete OS from A Hard Drive - EaseUS
Is this any help?

 

actually I don't thiskthis applies to me. I am taking what used to be a primary drive and making it a secondary ("slave drive"? might be the wrong term). As the primary drive it obviously needed the Win OS on it, as a back-up or even second drive it really doesn't need the original OS on it, correct?

 

Master/Slave is an obsolete concept. Now there is no master or slave.

You are correct that only one drive needs to have an OS. All other attached drives can be used 100% for data storage.

 

At least i am not an "obsolete man", (Sorry, it was the title of an old Twilight zone story )
but thank you for the answer