Win7 install and partitioning

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I have a 750 GB HHD of which is partitioned into 683 GB C: drive and 14.9 GB D: drive. C: drive has 598 GB free space and D: drive has 11.8 GB free space. I want to create a new partition x in which I plan to clean install Win 7. I will then transfer from the C: drive partition all my files, videos, pictures and miscellaneous to this newly created partition. I know that I have to have dual boot setup. After I have setup up and tested out Win 7, I plan to delete the old Vista C: drive partition. I believe this can be done but I need to know what the down side and pitfalls of doing this will be. Knowing this will help me determine if I should do this versus doing it the traditional way of erasing the HHD, repartitioning it and rebuilding the drive.

Any advice from those who have done this method would be greatly appreciated.

regards
johnb
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Vista Home Premium, SP2, 64Bit, Dell 435T, 6GB RAM, IE8, Avast Antivirus 5.0.594, Spybot S&D 1.6.2, ZoneAlarmPro 9.1.6, Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware 1.46, Windows Defender, Windows Malicious Software Removal, SuperAntiSpyware, Spyware Blaster, cCleaner, Glary Utilities, Speccy and Dialup.

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You should be able to dual boot between Windows Vista and Windows 7 without a 3rd party tool as long as the
older os has been installed first, which you already have.
You could create another partition and install Windows 7 on drive “D”, after the contents of “D” have been safely moved to
the newly created partition. Make sure you have enough room for the operating systems, at least 50-70 GBs each.
Is Windows 7 to be 64 bit as well?

C=Vista, D=W7, X=Other “storage” partition. Resize your partitions prior to installing the os so that X is the largest. And move data from D to X.

I’ve done this with XP when W7 became available. Get you partition sizes worked out prior to starting.

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Wow…your post gives me food for thought. Let’s think for a moment what you want to end up…I gather you want to have a computer with win 7 on your C: drive and all your files and programs on your C: drive as well, eventually eliminating your current OS from your C: drive. Of that’s correct, let me suggest a slightly different scenario.

Your C: drive has an operating system and other stuff. I would suggest you first partition your drive into two more sections, one for Win 7 and programs, and another for all your Documents, Pictures, etc. That way if you ever have to reformat your OS drive, your Documents and Pictures, and any other data you save on this second partition will not be affected.

Having said that, let’s go a bit further. If you partition as I suggest, you’ll have one partition with your current OS, another with Win 7, a third with Documents and Pictures, and a fourth that already exists, which I assume may well be a recovery drive. So far, so good.

You can leave your computer this way and set it to boot from your Win 7 Drive, leaving your current OS as it is in case of emergency, which allows you to boot your computer from it if you need to because something goes wrong with Win 7. Some people think this is not a bad idea.

However, if you want to eliminate your current OS, which I assume is on your C: drive, then, after you copy all your documents and pictures to your new partition created for Documents and Pictures, and you have Win 7 as an alternate boot partition, I would format the C: drive and install Win 7 on it. After that, format the second drive on which you installed Win 7 and merge the free space with your Documents and Pictures drive.

So you end up with the following: Drive C: Win 7 and Programs (which will have to be reinstalled to your boot drive no matter what)
Drive D: Documents and Pictures
Drive E: The other original partition which I assume is a recovery partition.

The end product is a nicely organized computer, with all info on one physical drive, but partitioned so that any problems with the OS will not affect your Documents and Pictures, nor you Recovery drive.

I would also suggest you purchase something like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image so you can set up a clone image of your C: drive on your D: drive and recover your C: drive within an hour if anything ever goes wrong with it.

I hope I’ve outlined this business correctly to give you a fairly fail-safe computer, with the exception that a hard drive failure will result in you possibly losing everything. The only way to beat that is to have your Documents and Pictures on second physical drive, and I’m not sure that your computer will allow that. I, personally, prefer it, but doing it depends upon whether or not you can install a second physical drive. If so, then your C: drive would contain a partition with your OS and your programs, along with a second partition that is now there, which I’ma assuming is your recovery partition, and your second physical drive would contain your Documents and Pictures, and another partition on which you would save your cloned images of your C: drive. That way, if you C: drive ever fails, you can install another and restore you OS and programs within an hour or so.

All this is something to think about, but if you take it one step at a time, it should go smoothly.

One thing I would add about the current shift to the gigantic drives now available. It reminds me of what occurred with memory sticks for digital cameras. They are now so large that one memory stick can store over 1000 5mb foto files. Of course, if you happen to step on the memory card, all the images can be destroyed. However, if you had smaller cards, then the loss of one would not result in you losing 1000 digital files.

I’m afraid there’s no easy out on this. Just remember that whatever you do, be sure to have a backup disk with all your Documents and Pictures. Operating systems can be reinstalled, but data files cannot be recreated.

Good luck.

Bertie91

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You could shrink the Vista drive (C:) and install Win7 in the free space. But then you would have three partitions: the old Vista partition, the Win7 partition (C:), and your old D: drive.

Another option is to copy the contents of D: elsewhere, reduce the size of C: and then use the entire freed space for Win7. This would leave you with 2 partitions: the old Vista partition (which would be the new D: drive) and the Win7 partition (C: drive). That’s not too bad.

The biggest question is how much Vista will let you shrink your C: drive. Disk Manager will let you shrink it some amount (I suggest you perform a defrag first), but if it doesn’t free up enough to suit you, you might have to use a third-party partitioning tool.

However, if I were you I’d go out and buy a second disk drive and install Win7 on it. If you do this, I recommend disconnecting the current drive before installing Win7 (I’ve discussed this in other posts). After you install Win7, reconnect the old drive and then copy over files at your leisure. If you get a large enough disk (I’ve seen 1.5TB drives advertised for under $100 at Fry’s), you can copy everything to the new disk, wipe the old one, and then repartiion as you like.

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There are lots of options to consider. I would also install the Win 7 OS on the X partition (When you boot to Win 7 the OS assigns it the C drive. Move all you data, pics, everything you want to the Win 7 partition. Once you have totally gotten everything you need from the Vista partition, delete it, then extend the Win 7 partition to include the unallocated space. (Any good 3rd party partition app can handle this chore easily, Partition Wizard is the free app I chose.) Once you have the (now) C Drive set up with Win 7 the way you want it, and regained all the space from your original Vista Drive, you can partition the Win 7 drive to seperate a partition for your data. This can be done without reloading Win 7 a second time.

Fred beat me to the punch (See post #6). I was going to edit this and say in my case I upgraded a total of 5 PCs to Win 7. In all cases I loaded Win 7 using a clean (Custom) install over Vista in each case. The windows.old folder is able to be opened just like any other folder and you can drag everything you need to the Win 7 OS without the hassles of setting up the dual boot, dragging everything over, then deleteing and recoverying the space. I must have had a long hard day at work to not mention this earlier. I have discussed this very concept in numerous other threads in these forums. It just makes sence and takes much less time.

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Any advice from those who have done this method would be greatly appreciated.
regards
johnb

John,
All excellent advice, Especially about Bertie91″s comment to “image” your system before you do anything ! Choose a backup program like Acronis, Paragon , Norton Ghost , the list is endless…Many times i have seen the results of a simple task go horribly wrong ( mostly me) and have been saved by the “backup image”, and I’m not talking about the software that comes with you “PC” . (system restore , recovery disks , etc.) to me there less than useless… (only my twisted opinion) One other thing … When you do a “clean install” (custom) over your OS, …”7″ makes a folder called “Windows .old” It will contain the “old pieces” That you can drag to your new OS, Just a thought Regards Fred

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I want to Thank all who have replied to my question.

I sorry for getting back to everyone; but I have been very busy wih non-computer related matters. Any way, I thank each and everyone for you input. I have copied and pasted the replies to word and will reread them to make sure I fully understand what is involved in partitioning my HDD.

Again Thanks and regards
johnb

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Most of the folks here gave good advice, especially about backing up before you do anything.

The only thing NOT TO DO is: after installing Win 7 in a dual boot configuration the way you want it, is to simply delete your current C: drive and expect that it will boot to Windows 7. It won’t.

Boot manager is on your current C: drive, with that partition marked as a System partition. If you delete this partition, you won’t be able to get to Windows 7.

The alternatives have already been mentioned before (namely re-install Win 7 in the C: partition, but then you lose any settings you had made previously in Win 7). I think the best alternative is: You can reconfigure Boot Manager to only boot to Windows 7, delete most of the files in the C: partition (except boot manager and associated files), shrink the existing boot Manager partition to almost nothing (using a re-partitioning product like Paragon, Easus or others), then reallocate the space formerly used in the Boot Manager partition to another existing (or new) partition.

Maybe someone else knows a way to make your Win 7 partition a system partition with it’s own boot manager so you can delete your C: partition and then boot to Windows 7, but I don’t know if it can be done or how.

Like I said, unless someone else knows how to do this, don’t delete your Boot Manager Partition….

Arbra

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I believe that EasyBCDshould be able to handle changing the MBR so that Win 7 contains the boot info, then ridding yourself of the old partition. After that any competent partition app should be able to recover the unused space. I use Partition Wizardfree edition for this.

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