Reformatting and harddrive swap?

Really sorry if this isnt the right section to ask this but i wasnt sure where to put it.

Basically i have a asus g51vx and it has 2 hard drives, when i got it i bought it with 1 SSD 80gig and 1 320g HD so basically the SSD is the main harddrive atm and windows is installed on that, however since it is only 80 and windows is so huge i can barely put anything on that hard drive so basically i want to reformat and install windows on the other HD but basically i dont know if i can just switch the 320 to the main IDE in the bios or i have to physically swap the locations of the hard drives

can anyone with experience help me with this

thank you guyz!

 

Simply change the boot order in the bios. Simple...

 

okay this is what i thought aswell, so the physical location of the hard drive doesn't make any difference you can just change the boot order correct?

so how should i approach the reformat? do i reformat first then change the boot order or do i change then reformat

 

Yes it does not matter where the drive is located.

Also, formatting and boot order have nothing in common. I would change the boot order first just to get it over with.

 

You can just reformat everything and install windows to whatever drive you want. Don't worry about changing stuff in the BIOS unless you're OCD about it (like I am lol).

I have a G50vt with two HDD's now (originally one). When I installed the second drive I had to swap HDD bays (since only one accommodates 12.5mm drives) and I rebooted perfectly fine without changing anything in the BIOS. Your BIOS will search all media for boot code, regardless of where it is. If there's only one hard drive to boot to, you can't go wrong.

Just note that you'll need to tell it to boot from your recovery disks on bootup (F10 or F12? I forgot) or your recovery partition (F9 for Asus) when you want to reformat.

 

jamesc23, could you check the power consumption of the dual-drive setup?

Does your power management software let you see how many watts the computer draws? If so, do some web surfing with both drives installed, then eject the multbay HDD and keep surfing. Let us know the difference in consumption.

As far as I know, this has never been tested. Here's your chance to make history.

BTW, I assume your main page file, Windows temp file and the browser temp files are all on the SSD, so pulling the HDD won't be a problem.

 

He has a G51. It's not a multibay, it's a second physical bay inside the computer that cannot be hot-swapped so readily. Also, his idle power will be much higher than most Thinkpads (as I see in your sig) since he has a high-end dedicated GPU that idles between 50 and 60C.

For reference, I use a 25W CPU and a 9800m GS undervolted to 0.68v with two hard drives. The lowest power consumption I've seen out of my computer is 18W, usually 20-27W.