Installed new SSD, trying to erase old hard drive

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Installed new SSD, trying to erase old hard drive

I recently overhauled my old Macbook Pro 2010 by replacing the battery, upgrading to 8 GB of RAM, and upgrading to a 256 Samsung SSD. I also bought a caddy and replaced the optical drive with my old macbook hard drive.

Now that the old hard drive is installed, I'd like to use it for overflow storage of movies, music, etc. but I'm having trouble erasing the data on it. When I access the Disk Utility, the options for erasing it are greyed out (I'm assuming because it contains formerly essential OS X data). How do I work around this?

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Jul 3, 2015 2:30 PM

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Answer 1

Loner T

Level 9

59,471 points

Jul 3, 2015 2:35 PM in response to cjkelly

Are you booting from the old HD or the new SSD? Can you post the output of diskutil list with your old drive connected?

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Answer 2

cjkelly Author

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Jul 3, 2015 2:36 PM in response to Loner T

RIght now it's booting from the old HD and I don't know how to change which drive it boots from.

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Jul 3, 2015 2:37 PM in response to cjkelly

What drive are you booting from - SSD or old HDD? Have you prepped the SSD and installed OS X on it? Or did you clone the HDD to the SSD? There is no reason why you should not be able to reformat the HDD if you are booted from the SSD. Please describe in detail what you did to try erasing the HDD.

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Answer 4

Loner T

Level 9

59,471 points

Jul 3, 2015 2:39 PM in response to cjkelly

Go To System Preferences -> Startup Disk and choose the SSD to boot from, assuming you have named it differently. If not, power-cycle your Mac and select the OSX from the internal disk, not the external disk which may have a USB/FW icon.

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Answer 5

Loner T

Level 9

59,471 points

Jul 3, 2015 3:27 PM in response to Loner T

Are you now able to erase/format you external old disk?

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