Windows 7: Windows 7 install on XP formatted both disks in machine

Hello
On Friday I attempted to install windows 7 ultimate x64
My existing machine is a XP Pro SP3 machine and it meets the system requirements as per Windows 7 upgrade advisor

I booted from DVD and followed the steps up to selecting where to installl windows 7

This list showed me
Disk 0 Partition 1
Disk 1 Partition 1
Disk 1 Partition 2

Disk 0 is my C drive where my windows xp is installed - 300GB disk
Disk 1 is where is store my files: pictures, music, documents etc - 500GB disk
Partition 2 of Disk 1 is unallocated 9GB

I selected Disk 0 Partition 1
Then selected Disk Options
Format Drive
Clicked Ok to the message about destroying data
And allowed the install to proceed

What i intended / expected to happen was that windows 7 ultimate would be installed on drive C: (Disk 0) and that drive D: (Disk 1) would remain intact and untouched by the process

The Windows 7 install completed successfully
I logged on to my user account, activated my windows 7 copy

I then looked at my disks and what i see is that:
Drive C was formatted and windows 7 was installed there
BUT
The install process formatted drive D and copied the windows XP installation to that drive

So i have lost a lot of data that i did not expect to, and, of course, had not backed up in ages. For now, anyway, thats beside the point.

I then removed the windows 7 DVD from the drive and rebooted the PC

When the disk was removed the machine booted to Windows XP - running from the copy taken earlier on Drive D

However, when i replaced the DVD to try to boot to windows 7 again, it began the installation process from the start

I would really like to understand what happened?

I dont remember selecting a dual boot option during the initial install, but maybe the steps i took led me to something like that by some default

If anyone has any insight that would be great thanks

Best regards

Patrick

Ooops ! You selected the wrong drive to format and install to.

Drive letters are different when seen from pre installation environment.

XP is where it always was.

Its weird though because both disks in the system were formatted

I didn't see an option to do that!!

Its my own fault anyway, based on experience of installing XP i thought it would run the same: choose install drive, format that drive and away you go...

Cringe, i didn't RTFM enough to know what would happen with the windows 7 install, i reckon

There is plenty of info on this forum so i think i'll read up a bit more before i try again

Hope you didn't lose any important info.

You are certainly not the first to do that.

You can also just install without formatting it again. In that case, you should get a message about data on there being saved to windows.old folder.

Thanks

Luckily i was able to recover most of the pictures that were lost - thank god - my wife would have killed me!!

I have a backup in place now - hindsight is useful

I didn't see any mention of the windows.old folder the first time around. was this because i chose the Format Disk option?

SOrry to hear that

I don't think both disks were formatted. Your XP would not exist. The Windows 7 install does not move move XP installs around (Though it may rename the windows folder to windows.old in some cases)

Sounds like you ended up formatting your non-XP drive and windows 7 installed there. So your original XP drive was left untouched. You may have actually had your C drive with Windows XP on it at disk1 as opposed to disk 0 as far as the low level drivers were concerned and never knew it.

You can probably confirm that in the drive manager in Computer Management.

Though for this kind of reason, I always recommend to anyone installing windows, to unplug all drives but the ONE drive they wish to format/install on, then add back the other drives afterwards.

Thanks for the info

When i used to look in My Computer C: was always listed as the 300Gb disk and D: as the 500GB

But now this is reversed and Windows XP is install on the 500GB disk

So C: is the 500Gb disk and D: the 300 but in Computer Management DISK 0 is the 300GB (D) and DISK 1 the 500 (C)
Far Out!!

Thanks for that tip. I am going to try again to install win 7 ultimate on the 300GB disk and will disconnect the other beforehand

Tips for Reinstalling Windows 7

I have not seen windows 7 installer move another entire o/s to a different Hard Drive.

Anybody come across that before?

Are you saying it was previously on the 300gb HD?

Forget about the drive letters.

Thanks for the tips and shoulders !

I went thru a lot of posts here and found some great advice and tutorials

For my own system i disconnected the 300gb disk and tried to reboot from 500gb and got disk boot failure

I then tried to boot from the 300gb and got bootmgr not found

So i rebooted from windows 7 dvd and installed to the 300gb disk

During the process i removed the partition already on this disk and formatted

So, now I have a clean win 7 ultimate install, working fine (luckily i was able to recover nearly all fotos as well, phew)

I believe my earlier problem came from a mix up between logical drive letters vs physical disks

I thought I was installing to the 300gb disk but it was actually the 500gb

It seems to me like the install unearthed a problem / mix up with this system that has bee knocking around for a while

To be honest i dont know for certain but from now on am keeping a log of the system spec, so live and learn