Moving old Win 10 system disk into Win 11 PC as secondary drive

I've just set up a new old PC (i7-8700) as my first running Win 11. I'd like to move the HD in my old Win 10 PC into this new one as a secondary drive as it holds all my documents. If I do so, will it confuse the bootloader on the Win 11 machine? I want it to boot to Win 11. Thanks.

Follow-up: What if I want to have the option to also boot the old Win 10 system? How would I enable the second drive to also be a boot drive? (I know I'd likely have driver issues, but would like to know anyway.)

Apesbrain said:

I've just set up a new old PC (i7-8700) as my first running Win 11. I'd like to move the HD in my old Win 10 PC into this new one as a secondary drive as it holds all my documents. If I do so, will it confuse the bootloader on the Win 11 machine? I want it to boot to Win 11. Thanks.

Follow-up: What if I want to have the option to also boot the old Win 10 system? How would I enable the second drive to also be a boot drive? (I know I'd likely have driver issues, but would like to know anyway.)

Click to expand...

There's been lots of posts over time where having a second drive in a computer during setup can cause issues if the second drive has or had a former installation of the OS on it. If the second drive was bootable but not wiped clean the booting could be confused. My experience since getting a job in a computer store in '94 and building/repairing computers has shown that installing the OS on an only drive and getting it working is best then add a second drive later. I use a USB Dual-bay drive dock connected to a Linux desktop to copy any files to be saved to another [third] drive then using GPARTED to wipe the original drive clean before using it for additional storage, advantage is the third drive can be saved as an archive.

Berton said:

There's been lots of posts over time where having a second drive in a computer during setup can cause issues if the second drive has or had a former installation of the OS on it.

Click to expand...

In this case, the Win 11 PC has already been set up with a clean install. I'm just moving an SSD from the old PC to the new. Bootloader won't see the second drive at all, right?

If the BIOS can see a drive when the computer is turned on the Operating System will know about it. The OS reads the BIOS to know about the resources available and sets up accordingly such as loading drivers.

When you install the old drive to the new computer it's just another boot able drive on the system.
Probably the new Win 11 drive was set as UEFI-GPT and if the old drive is also set as UEFI-GPT, all you have to do is to launch the Boot menu (F12?) during POST and select the old drive to boot from it.
If the old drive was set as Legacy-MBR, it's a little more complicated as BIOS must be set to boot as UEFI-GPT and Legacy-MBR. In this case I suggest you convert the old drive from Legacy-MBR to UEFI-GPT.

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