Installing a new OS drive

[douglasb]

Im going to buy a Samsung 830 (128GB) & put windows 7 on it as my OS later this week.

My question is what will happen to the c:\ drive that currently has my vista OS on it? Will it become undetectable, replaced by the new OS drive or will the new drive be lettered higher (e:\ since I already have a d:\ drive)

Thanks,

Douglasb

[matts-uk]

The boot partition, is always the C: drive, beyond which you can assign whatever letter you like to whatever partition you like.

Personally, I would remove the power leads from all the drives other than new SSD and then perform a clean install of Windows 7. Once the OS is running, connect up the other drives one at a time, go into Storage Management and assign drive letters as required and move any data that needs to be migrated.

For an inplace upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 (presuming all the pre-requisites are met), you would need to image (ghost) the existing Vista drive onto the SSD, ensuring the SSD can boot Vista before performing the Windows 7 upgrade. Again, I find it easier to unplug un-necessary drives when imaging, to save any confusion.

Note. Any dependancy on drive letters contained in your existing data (documents) can be broken by assigning drive new drive letters. This is rarely a problem these days but can still crop up.

[douglasb]

Thanks for the quick reply matts-uk, it was very helpful!

It has answered all my questions but also given me a new one:
If you assign a drive a new letter what happens to the data on it? Will it all remain or will the drive be wiped?

Edit: I'v just thought of another question... What would be the effect of swapping round where all the drives are plugged into the mobo? Is the drive recognised by letter or socket in the mobo?

[IronWarrior]

As matts said, unplug all other drives and install a clean installation of Windows and then hook up all the drives and edit the drive letters to what you like.

You will find that old Windows drive will be D or something or H when it's all back up and running.

If you want to boot back to that drive, if you put in System Recovery disk in you can recover the boot mgr for that drive, allowing you to boot back to it.

[douglasb]

When all the drives are unplugged i'll have no OS effectively. I'll be installing windows from a digital copy, can you do that with no OS? ie... Could I boot up with a blank SSD (possibly containing the digital copy of windows I want to install, although I may put it on a usb or external drive instead) and would it be able to work out what I wanted it to do & start the installation? Or do digital copies need installing from within an OS?

[Barry]

afaik the Asus P5K Premium supports boot from USB so you should be able to just wack the extracted windows files on the root of the USB stick and pick the option to boot from the stick in boot devices, failing that you can boot in to windows and start the installer in windows and pick the SSD as your install drive

[matts-uk]

If you assign a drive a new letter what happens to the data on it? Will it all remain or will the drive be wiped?

The data remains intact. A drive letter is just the 'virtual' pointer the OS needs to find a particular partition.

The Windows GUI is pretty good at warning you when data is going to be wiped. The DOS prompt commands like fdisk, format and delete are not so forgiving, so you probably want to stay away from those.

A word of caution when using Storage Manager. Read the dialogs fully and if you do not understand them, do not click OK.

What would be the effect of swapping round where all the drives are plugged into the mobo? Is the drive recognised by letter or socket in the mobo?

Nostalgia time.

There was a time when plugging drives in physical sockets and setting dip switches, was crucial to a partition ending up with the right drive letter assigned to it. The first partition on the first drive was always C: unless it was hidden, the second partition would be D: unless you had two drives, when the first partition on the second drive would become D: and the second partition on the first drive would become E: Then you might add a SCSI drive and the assignments changed again. Much time was spent scratching knuckles and breaking finger nails, swapping drives in and out, as you tried to recall how all the damn rules fitted together.

Thankfully these days, everything is a lot more virtual. A modern BIOS will allow you to select the the boot drive and the SATA interface is clever enough to know how many drives are connected.

Drive letters within modern versions of Windows are the NTFS equivalent of the human Appendix - A throwback we could do without. Windows will assign a drive letter automatically, roughly following the arcane runes of the old physical connection schemes but you can pop into Storage Manager and reassign, almost to your hearts content. In some circumstances, you might even choose to remove the drive letter completely and 'mount' a partition in an empty folder, similar to the Linux filing systems.

I'll be installing windows from a digital copy, can you do that with no OS?

Only when doing an inplace upgrade, which I personally would avoid.

As you have spotted, there is a catch 22 here. To install a new OS on a new drive, you need a second bootable disk to run the OS installer from. The easiest and safest option is to burn a bootable CD, typically from an ISO image of the installation media. You should check booting from CD is enabled in the BIOS before you start.

If you have not done this sort of thing before, I would recommend having another device you can use to get to Google and this forum with, while carrying out the installation. Alternatively, find a mate that has done this sort of think before and ask them to give you a hand.

[douglasb]

If you have not done this sort of thing before, I would recommend having another device you can use to get to Google and this forum with, while carrying out the installation. Alternatively, find a mate that has done this sort of think before and ask them to give you a hand.

I built the computer myself and installed Vista from nothing. The only difference here is that I'm installing from digital media rather than disk which was what had lead to my questions. I'll have my laptop standing by though so I can access the vast sea of knowledge here if need be.

Since my mobo supports booting from USB I'll just do that, thanks for all your help people!