So, I recently bought a Samsung 840 SSD and installed windows 8 on it. I have a separate hard disk also installed in the system where I had Windows 7 installed and now when I try to format the hard disk Windows 8 won't let me. Can anyone help?
I've run into similar issues. If you make sure to take ownership of the HDD and also remove security locks on the drive, it should work. It also could be that the system sees an OS and is like woah your about to screw up your pc, hold up. Go through and manually delete the windows files and see if it will allow you to do it that way and then format it. A little more info on what exactly it is doing would be great, but it shouldn't be a huge issue. If push comes to shove however, you could go back to an older version of windows on another PC to format it and just bring it back home to use the disk freely from then on.
Also, if you have an external drive connected you might want to disconnect it, that was the reason I couldn't format anything on my Win 8 install somehow.