Adding second HDD which has a vista install on

[Robert1986]

Basically, I bought a new case, windows 7 and a new HDD to install it on. When putting all the parts into the new case, I only installed the new HDD.

Now I want to add my old HDD which had vista installed on it. Can I just add this drive and boot up into windows 7 then format the vista drive?

 

[Corasik]

Yes, wont be a problem, plug it in. Depending on which port you plug it into it will either come up as a master or slave. Slave is easiest, but it doesnt matter.

Let the system start to boot up, if it boots off the Vista disk, you'll have to go to bios and find where to change the boot order, and just swap the hard disks over virtually. (Or you can swap the cables over)

Otherwise if it boots to Win7 as normal, you should just see the vista disk pop right in. Assuming you already have some optical drives (d/e/f) etc the second disk might get a "silly" drive letter.. I think mine popped in at J: but you can manually change that under disk management if it annoys you.

 

[Banzai_Joe]

Yes, wont be a problem, plug it in. Depending on which port you plug it into it will either come up as a master or slave. Slave is easiest, but it doesnt matter.

Let the system start to boot up, if it boots off the Vista disk, you'll have to go to bios and find where to change the boot order, and just swap the hard disks over virtually. (Or you can swap the cables over)

Otherwise if it boots to Win7 as normal, you should just see the vista disk pop right in. Assuming you already have some optical drives (d/e/f) etc the second disk might get a "silly" drive letter.. I think mine popped in at J: but you can manually change that under disk management if it annoys you.

You sure about that?
I assume the op is using sata disks? If he adds a vista os disk on whatever sata port then it should add the install to the bootstrap and give the dual boot options at startup, defaulting to boot into win7 if he doesn't make a choice. (sometimes a 'repair' needs to be performed for the the bootstrap to be amended).
If it doesn't add the the vista install to the bootstrap then its all gravy and once booted into win7 just format the disk as normal.

Master and slave are things of the past with sata as only one sata cable can hold one device.