My no-kids-allowed desktop PC was running trusty reliable Windows XP until March. I decided to upgrade to Windows 8 and I've always wanted an SSD. So I bought both, installed fresh Win8 on new SSD, and use my old HDD for storage. I downloaded and installed the latest copy of iTunes and pointed the path for my data to the appropriate location on old drive.
Since you have a need to format this hard drive now, you may with to take a similar approach separating the operating system from your programs and data on two drives.