Windows 7 clean install - re-format & partition query

[PaulBrum]

Hi there - I'm running vista Home Premium 64 bit and am going to do a clean install of windows 7 Ultimate.

Reading up, it appears I can format my hard drive and re-partition during install which is what I want to do - wipe the slate clean as it were

I have a 600gb hard drive, partitoned 253 gb (C drive with vista installed) 12gb (D drive for windows swapfile) and 330gb (F drive - primarily for data).

My question is - am I correct in assuming i can reformat the hard drive during install (I have the full install vers of W7) and should I keep the partitions as I created them previously. Do I need the smaller drive for a swapfile?

Help, as always really appreciated.

Paul

[aidanjt]

I did just that on the old mans machine after he ordered the Win7 upgrade.

[CaptainCrash]

There's really no need for a dedicated swap partition, this isn't Linux - just let Windows take care of the pagefile automatically on the system partition. Vista and Win7 are pretty good at managing virtual memory, and they'll likely do a better job of it than you will.

If you had a second (physically separate) drive, you might in theory see some benefit in creating an an additional pagefile on it, but even then it's unlikely to make much difference in practice, unless you're very short of RAM.

If you want to keep the 330GB partition for data, you could just delete the 253 and 12GB partitions, and create a single new one for the OS (select "Custom (advanced)" then "Drive options (advanced)" at the appropriate points in the installation). Unlike some previous versions of Windows, Win7 seems smart enough to allocate drive letters correctly even when there are pre-existing secondary partitions, so you won't end up with the OS installed on D or F or something silly. It will also create a small 100MB system reserved partition for the boot/recovery files, as you probably know.

Alternatively, you could zap the whole drive and start from scratch - 253/265GB seems a bit excessive for the OS, and some of it might be more usefully allocated to the data partition. It might be a bit inconvenient though, depending on what data you have on the existing F drive, and whether or not it's backed up.

[pp05]

Hi there - I'm running vista Home Premium 64 bit and am going to do a clean install of windows 7 Ultimate.

Reading up, it appears I can format my hard drive and re-partition during install which is what I want to do - wipe the slate clean as it were

I have a 600gb hard drive, partitoned 253 gb (C drive with vista installed) 12gb (D drive for windows swapfile) and 330gb (F drive - primarily for data).

My question is - am I correct in assuming i can reformat the hard drive during install (I have the full install vers of W7) and should I keep the partitions as I created them previously. Do I need the smaller drive for a swapfile?

Help, as always really appreciated.

Paul

I would say do the partitioning and formatting in XP. Then when you install Win7, you can select one drive from which it will run from.

[CaptainCrash]

I would say do the partitioning and formatting in XP. Then when you install Win7, you can select one drive from which it will run from.

Maybe I'm just being thick, but that doesn't seem to make any sense at all...

[PaulBrum]

CC - thanks for the advice - I'm furiously backing up as we speak - so I dont need to keep anything on the hard drive.

If i dont need the smaller partiton for a swapfile i would like to create just the 2 partitons.

I currently use the C drive for windows and programs, the F drive for data, pics, vids, etc etc.

How would I go about 'zapping the drive' and starting from scratch - I really want to get rid of all the clutter I have amassed on the computer over the last 6 months. Can i then create 2 partitons during the windows install?

Help apprectaied

Paul

[CaptainCrash]

When you get to the "Which type of installation do you want?" screen, select "Custom", then at "Where do you want to install Windows?" hit the "Drive options (advanced)" button.

You can then delete the existing partitions and create new one(s) according to whatever suits you (obviously you'd normally install Windows on the first one). It will tell you it "may" create additional system partitions (the boot/recovery partition mentioned earlier) - it *will* do this on a blank HDD, so just let it go ahead and do its thing. It's only 100MB, and it's not allocated a drive letter, so it wont appear in Windows Explorer.

It's really a pretty simple process, what catches most people out is not noticing the "Drive options (advanced)" button when they want a custom partition layout. Once you're past that it's plain sailing, or at least it should be.

[PaulBrum]

OK, sounds relatively simple - i dont need to fromat the hard drive beofre installation then.

Re partitions, what would you suggest for the size of the 2 partitons considering one will have windows AND programs, the other data - 200 for windows and progs - 400 for data ?

Paul

[CaptainCrash]

Well, I have a 150GB OS partition, and I'm currently using about 25% of it, with Office 2007 and a variety of other productivity and multimedia apps installed. I'm sure I could easily have got away with 100GB or less, but Windows likes a certain amount of free space and the amount used tends to increase over time with software installations, system restore points, recycle bin and so on, so I erred on the side of caution when I created the system partition. HDD space is cheap these days, so not a big deal.

I'd say 150GB would be more than enough for "normal" use, but if you have loads of space-consuming games installed on the OS partition, you might need to allocate more.

So I suppose the rather unhelpful answer is "it depends"....

[aidanjt]

I got Win7, messaging/telephoney apps, virtualbox, openoffice, google stuff, swap, etc into a 30gb system partition, with 12gb to spare. All user profiles are on the next partition, which by far uses the majority of disk space. It's worked out well.

[lego batman]

See the famous Zak's Partition Theory: http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...on-theory.html

[Zak33]

/\ and dont bother with a seperate partition for your pagefile...

in fact... mine is OFF totally with 4 gig of ram.. but that's not essential.

Moving the pagefile to a DIFFERENT partition on the SAME drive, just makes the read-head whoosh around all the more anyway....defeating the benefit. It only really benefits on a very few systems if it's on a SECOND entire hard drive... then it can just do that job.

Don't bother with that.... just partition around the first 20% of your drive and install Win7 and leave the pagefile alone

[PaulBrum]

All - just to close this out - I have managed to format the drive during installation and created a partition - 200gb for windows and programs and 400gb for data.

Forming partitons was relatively easy, although you have to remember to create the second drive, not just leave it as unused hard drive (I did this 1st time and windows only saw 1 200gb drive). Also remember to highlight where you want windows installed. After a couple of attempts (user error ) I managed to set it up correctly.

Windows automatically adds a small 100mb partition, i suspect for system files.

Have managed to change the location of the windows libraries from C drive to D drive - that should make aoutsving a lot easier.

All in all pretty easy - I even managed to use the DAZ loader which, by the way is ace!

Thanks to all for help

Paul

[badass]

I got Win7, messaging/telephoney apps, virtualbox, openoffice, google stuff, swap, etc into a 30gb system partition, with 12gb to spare. All user profiles are on the next partition, which by far uses the majority of disk space. It's worked out well.

Did you use the process below (or similar) or did you edit the registry then create/move the user profiles?
I've doen the registry hack method before (on Windows XP and Server 2000) but using junction points looks cleaner to me

It looks like Jimmie R. Houts over at serverfault has the answer I am looking for. He referenced this article with more information.

To expand on his answer, after installing windows 7:

1. You boot with the install media.
2. At the screen with the "Install Now" choose "Repair your computer"
3. You will be asked if you want to "Repair and Restart" by the System Recovery options, choose "No".
4. Then Make sure that Windows 7 is listed as one of the installed OS's available for recovery, it's selected and them press next.
5. You will be given a list of recovery tools, chose "Command Prompt".
6. In the command prompt you will be using Robocopy to copy c:\Users to d:\Users
7. Type robocopy c:\Users d:\Users /mir /xj
8. /mir tells robocopy to mirror the directories, this will copy all files and permissions.
9. /xj is very important, this tells robocopy not to follow junction points. If you forget this, you will have a lot of trouble.
10. Make sure no files failed to copy (FAILED column = 0).
11. Remove the old Users Folder from the c: drive: rmdir /S /Q C:\Users
12. Create a NTFS Junction that points to the new Users folder: mklink /J C:\Users D:\Users

Now restart and there you go. No further configuration or fiddling required. New user profiles will all be stored on the d: drive, as will any user specific data. And it is achievable without any messing about in the registry, searching and replacing values, or having to mess with new profiles in any way. Totally fire and forget.