Laptop replacement question

Thanks for your input. The new laptop has a 256 GB solid-state drive, plus an empty 2.5" hard drive slot.

Most of the time a modern notebook BIOS setup will let you select the primary boot drive. There are no cables, switches or jumpers to set. If you have a new system with a Win 10 boot drive and an old win 7 bootable drive the system should be intelligent enough to make the old drive a secondary drive.

IF it is not and on the small chance having two boot drives onboard confuses the controller then you will have to clear off the drive (after copying with the USB box) and make it non booting. While this can be done with Win 10 commands it is far easier and safer in most cases to simply download the setup software from the drive manufacturer that will do partitioning and cloning. This can be used with the drive in the box or installed in the notebook.

You mean by interrupting the bootup process/going into diagnostics mode (with F12 or ESC or whatever)?

Is there a way to make it non-booting without clearing the memory?

Lazy ol’ me just set up the new laptop, took out the hard drive from the old one, installed it in the new one, and fired 'er up.

And it worked fine. The system did a disk check automatically, and there was some weirdness with permissions, but now I have full access and it appears that all files are there.

Yippee! I love the new laptop. Solid state drive is fast as heck!