Just bought a new laptop for work that has a 256 gb ssd drive and a 1tb 7200 rpm drive.
I believe that the operating system is installed on the SSD and you can store data on that or the 1tb drive.
I want to change the 7200 rpm drive to a 2.5 inch ssd for various reasons.
Would it just be a case of swapping them and it would all configure itself automatically, or is there more to it?

There is no info stored on the drive as yet and its a HP omen if that makes any difference
TIA

Should just plug in and be recognised in this day and age. Once Windows boots from the existing SSD, you may need to format your D: drive before you can store files on it, otherwise it should just all work.

What @toby said.

I’d open up Disk Manager before doing anything just to confirm that the ‘nothing’ on the second drive is actually nothing. It would be very sensible (but probably highly unlikely) for them to have stuck system recovery information on there or other data for their own nefarious purposes.

Once you’ve swapped the drives it should Just Work at the hardware level, the days of fannying about in BIOS are long gone, but you’ll need to format it in Windows. Again, you may need Disk Manager for this, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Windows 10 went “ooh, new disk, would sir or madam care for it to be set up?” (somewhat astonishingly I’ve never actually done this with W10 and a brand spanker drive yet).

Sounds easy enough then.
Good point about checking for recovery software though ill do that first

One highly unlikely qualifier – If you have to enter a Boot/BIOS password when the machine is powered on, then the removed drive may not (wont) work if you stick it in another computer – you need to go into the BIOS and disable the HDD password, remove the drive, put the new one in and set the HDD password.

This is not a “Bitlocker”, “Veracrypt”, “TrueCrypt”, etc. password, but an old fashioned BIOS one.

You may also have issues using the old drive if the machine use TPM for Bitlocker but I have no experience with TPM – If your machine uses Bitlocker without you entering a password, it may rely on TPM – that’s all I know.

Bet the recovery partition is in the primary SSD. That’s where the bug OEMs normally put it. It’ll appear as a small partition ahead of the C drive in disk manager.

Note that your user libraries e.g. My Documents, My Pictures etc can be configured to a different location. They default to C:\Users\revs1972\Documents etc. However if you want to use a second drive for bulk storage, you can point them to D:\Users.. etc if you want. But I’d only put the ones you are expecting lots of large files like pictures and videos, small stuff like documents etc can stay on the SSD since you have a big enough one and it’ll make the system more responsive.

To change the location of the library just right click on it and select properties, there’s a location tab.

Some systems will use the SSD as a cache for the HDD in which case swapping the HDD will be swapping the OS disk. Open up the disk manager thing to see what the actual layout is before doing anything.

opening up the disk manager it shows the following

Disk 0 (ssd drive) contains Windows (C:) and windows RE tools

Disk 1 (7200 rpm) contains DATA (D:) (917.07 GB) and Recovery (E:) (14.44 GB NTFS)

I have made a copy of the recovery program contained in E.

Tomorrow, when I install the new SSD drive to replace Disk 1 , I shall partition it into D and E and copy the recovery program back to E.

Unless I am missing something obvious , should the above work ??

SSDs always used to come with a disc clone tool. Might be easiest just to clone the old one.

If you’ve got access to another windows 10 machine I’d just nuke all the recovery stuff. You can just use another PC to create an install USB and go from scratch.

This is an educated guess rather than fact, but I’d expect the recovery partition to be a cut-down version of Windows rather than just ‘some data’, so manually copying files probably isn’t going to work. If you want to keep it, you’d need to clone the partition.

Question is, do you want to keep it? Using the recovery will in essence do a factory reset – it’ll put the machine into the state it was when it was new. This will include all the drivers etc you may need, but also whatever trial software and assorted foisterware was bundled with it. You can create your own rescue environment instead by creating a USB installation ‘disc’ which will give you a clean install. https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10

Why are you swapping the drive, out of interest?

Why are you swapping the drive, out of interest?

The primary drive is only 256GB (SSD) which is more than enough for running the programs I use.
I like to keep all my CAD models on the secondary hard drive so I can bring up older stuff when ever I need it.
Things may have changed in the last 5 years with regards to build quality on the standard drives, but on the last computer I used before switching to a MacBook Pro ( which I was using windows on dual boot) I managed to break the drive after moving the computer around on site whilst it was accessing info. Since the MacBook, I want to use SSD drives.

When I bought a new laptop I went up to 17 inch (easier on my aging eyes lol), and to get a model with 256 + 1TB SSD’s would have been around £400 more expensive. Hence buying a Samsung Drive (£107) and changing it myself.
Just finished doing it now and all was pretty straightforward.
Ill stick the “old” drive in a caddy and give to the young un for backups.
Just got to get used to the @ key being back in the proper place 🙂