I had an issue with an old hard drive. The issue is probably irrelevant to this post, but please ask if you need to know. Anyway, I put a new SSD in, installed Windows on it, and now I’ve plugged the old hard drive back in as what will basically be a storage drive. It still has all of my Windows and Program files on it, which I want to get rid of. It’s remarkably resilient to deletion so I was hoping to format it, but I have a stack of stuff on it I still want. Is there a way to format it but keep just that one directory of stuff? Or do I have to move it to a separate drive and then back again?

Hmmm, might not matter now anyway, plugging the old hard drive back in appears to have brought back the old problem of random shutdowns, even when the drive was not being used.

Never mind… :)

Fair enough.

To answer your original question though. You’d need to partition the drive into two partitions, copy your old data to the new partition and then format or delete the original partition.
Then you resize the new partition back to the original capacity of the drive.

Beware, this sort of thing can lead to data loss and a wise man would have his data backed up.

Google partition editors. I’m sure there are free Windows tools for the job. I usually use a bootable copy of Gparted which is a Linux program.

I cannot help you apart from suggesting you temporarily boot up under a new OS, (or give the drive to someone running an alternative OS) and change the drive designation to non-system disk. I had similar issues, where Windows still accepts the original disk/Windows Directory as an additional system disk.

I cannot help you apart from suggesting you temporarily boot up under a new OS, (or give the drive to someone running an alternative OS) and change the drive designation to non-system disk. I had similar issues, where Windows still accepts the original disk/Windows Directory as an additional system disk.

Good Morning Forumites

Another glorious day up here in FNQ, it’s a shame I will be spending most of it indoors.

15 degrees right now.

I can’t help either, other than suggesting that hard drives are so cheap now it’s probably not worth the hassle of trying to keep an old one going; especially if:
a) It contains data you want to keep.
b) It isn’t reliable

Thankyou all for the suggestions.

Rev, that’s probably what I’ll do. I thought the problem could be fixed by making it the backup as it seemed an integral Windows/HDD issue, but looks like it was just HDD, so time to buy a new one.

Twoy said:

Hmmm, might not matter now anyway, plugging the old hard drive back in appears to have brought back the old problem of random shutdowns, even when the drive was not being used.

It does sound like this drive has developed some sort of hardware fault, but it might still be usable once it’s repartioned / reformatted, since file systems can handle disks with bad regions on them. OTOH, drives are so cheap these days that it’s probably not worth the risk or the hassle.

I suspect that Windows is getting a bit confused because the drive still says that it’s a primary system drive. Also, it’s possible that the drive has a sick boot sector / MBR and that it’ll behave nicely once the MBR is repaired.

You could probably use a repartitioning tool to quarantine the files you want to keep, but it’d be much simpler (and faster) to simply copy them to a known good drive – moving large amounts of files around on a drive is a rather time-consuming process, especially if the drive has lots of faulty sectors.

If you want to risk continued use of the old drive you will need to format it, and it’s probably a good idea to repartition it, to force a new MBR to be created. You could do that with Windows-based stuff, but doing it under Linux will eliminate the system confusion problem I mentioned earlier. For that matter, simply booting the system with Linux (either a Linux live CD / DVD or Linux-based repair CD) and seeing if it randomly shuts down would help to diagnose if it is a software-based problem. If the system appears to be stable, rescue the data and then repartition / reformat the drive.

Under Linux, it’s very easy to clone partitions and whole drives, either to a new drive, or in the form of a disk image file. Linux-based disk repair & recovery software can operate on such disk images files, which can be very handy when you’re trying to recover stuff off disks with severe hardware faults.

Similarly, it’s quite easy to save the boot sector of a disk or partition to a file, and to restore the boot sector from the file in case something horrible happens.

PM 2Ring said:

I suspect that Windows is getting a bit confused because the drive still says that it’s a primary system drive. Also, it’s possible that the drive has a sick boot sector / MBR and that it’ll behave nicely once the MBR is repaired.

EasyBCD is excellent for fixing all that in Windows. I’ve used it a couple of times with perfect results.
http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD

To answer the original question in the OP:

Twoy said:

Is there a way to format it but keep just that one directory of stuff?

It’s possible to do that, but it’s generally not practical, since the contents of the directory are quite likely to be scattered all over the place. So you’d have to delete all the stuff you don’t want to keep, and then defrag the disk, but defragging’s not advisable on a disk with suspected hardware issues, since you’re likely to suffer major data loss if the system dies in the middle of defragging.

OTOH, if all the desired files are guaranteed to be in a known range of sectors then, yes, you could modify the partitioning of the drive so that stuff you want to keep is in one partition, with empty partitions before & after it.

But that’s a lot of mucking around compared to just saving the desired files to a new drive. :)