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Install Windows 7 to secondary drive
Hi,
I bought this computer for my wife two years ago. To keep the price down, I limited the hard drive to 20 gb. Big mistake! By the way, SIW says its size is 320 gb, which is curious, but it really only holds 20 gb. That's what I paid for and that's what Windows says it holds.
Anyway, I recently bought a 500 gb drive for a data drive. When I copied her data over, I realized that even with all her music files, she only has about 4 gb of data. The other 15 gb are taken up by Windows XP and applications! In any case, the nearly empty new drive is currently drive 1 and the old drive is, of course, drive 0.
I'm getting to the point. I want to install Windows 7 Ultimate on the 500 gb drive. Data is backed up on an external drive (and Carbonite) and I plan to reformat the new drive when installing the new OS. I'm wondering if I need to take any particular steps for everything to work out and if so, in what order.
1. Do I need to do anything in the BIOS to reverse the priority of the drives, i.e., make the new drive primary?
2. Is there anything I need to do to remove any ownership Windows XP feels towards the new drive?
3. Is it ok to just reformat the old drive at the same time (get rid of XP)? Does it matter? There's no interest in making it dual boot.
Thanks so much in advance for any clarification you can provide!