PC New Build - Hard Drives New & Old

I am in the process of building my first pc, getting all the components within a week, techy to a point but far from someone who is experienced, & as far as computers go have a couple of questions concerning internal hard drives for storage.

1. I have a few hard drives I removed from some old computers when we upgraded our home pc's, not sure whats on them. If I use these in my build do I have to reformat it or will it just work & I can delete whats on it?

2. I purchased a brand new mechanical hard drive & since it is fresh out of the box do I need to format it once its in my new build or can I just start to use it after its plugged in?

As for my build I do have some technical background and feel comfortable building it , just wish I understood more of the technical issues, OS installation, motherboard & driver installations, etc...I will be getting someone who knows more about that to help me.

With that said I will be on line from time to time asking questions and getting advise from those more knowledgeable then myself. Many thanks to those who help me along the way.

If you are trying to access the data on the old hard drives then they should automatically show up in explorer when searching. If you plan on installing windows on the brand new drive then just use the windows install cd to partition the drive how you want and install windows. No formatting necessary as it will do it before the install starts. You won't be able to boot to the old drives in your new system due to different hardware.

johnb35 said:

If you are trying to access the data on the old hard drives then they should automatically show up in explorer when searching. If you plan on installing windows on the brand new drive then just use the windows install cd to partition the drive how you want and install windows. No formatting necessary as it will do it before the install starts. You won't be able to boot to the old drives in your new system due to different hardware.

Click to expand...

Thanks, As for the old hard drive I think I'll just buy some new ones, not worth taking a chance on getting a virus if one was infected. This might sound stupid but I always thought everything was installed on the SSD, programs such as Apache, the OS, Publisher, Paint, Lightroom 6, etc... and the hard drive was for storage only, learning as I go.

If your worried about them being infected, just run a scanner on them with out booting to them or just format them.

StrangleHold said:

If your worried about them being infected, just run a scanner on them with out booting to them or just format them.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the advise