Formatting hard drive

Hi All,
I have a spare hard drive (160gb sata) and i wish to install it
in one of my pc's.
It originally came in one my Dell pc's but i put a larger HD in and put
this one away in a box.
It has win xp home on it.
What i am after is totally cleaning the drive and then installing it as
a 2nd drive with no operating system so as i can store mp3's and
suchlike.
What i was going to do is take the drive out of my pc,install this one
then go to dos and "format c:" and then put the old drive back in
and use the formatted one for storage.
Not having done this before im just after making sure im going about this
the right way.
If im being an idiot please feel free to let me know

 

You can put that hd in as a slave, as soon as the pc reconizes it you can go to my computer, right click that hard drive and format, it will then be ready for storage. You dont need to take the other one out, leave it as master. ed

 

Would be simpler to just install it in the new PC as a second drive and format it clean from within Windows. From a command prompt would work as well. In either case, make absolutely sure the drive you want to format is the one you actually do.

 

Thank you guys for the quick responses
I was originally going to do as both of u guys said and
put the hard drive in with the existing drive but was concerned
that it may get confused as to which drive to boot from as it will
have 2 drives with O/S on.
So the initial drive will be assigned as the master drive and will
boot up as normal then ?

 

Both drives would have active primary partitions, but for the machine to boot from the second drive, there would have to be boot files on the first drive that support booting from the second drive, which there aren't. When you get to the point of doing the actual format, look at the directory of the drive to make sure it's the one you want-- it should differ somehow from the other in a way you should be able to differentiate. Not trying to make you nervous, just confident.

 

Thank you both very much for the assistance
Ive popped the drive into the case.
Just gotta get myself a sata cable and crack on.