problem has been resolved.
Though not without reformatting everything.
I formatted the ssd, installed windows 7, booted with the hdd installed that i suspect caused the trouble. I guided bios to boot from the ssd hitting f8 early
(with the last win 7 install it wanted to boot from the hdd even though bios boot priority had ssd as first, so this time i tried to use the f8 boot device choice).
Surprisingly it worked, and in windows i could follow #3 reply to clean the old hdd to get rid of the 100 mb system partition, and set up a new partition on it.
thank you for your help