I am trying to be very careful here to avoid future time consuming problrems.
I am an absolute novice regarding the installation of Windows, and need all the help I can get.
I found the following, which causes me concern regarding using "format."
advice from experts is needed, readily admitting I do need help, but want to avoid messing things up. I presume I have two partitions since Win 7 and OSX are on the machine. I have absolutely no idea what to do first.
"Rather than use the 'Format' command, it would be best to instead first DELETE the relevent partition, and then to CREATE a new partition of the same size, in the resulting free drive space. A format will be performed as part of the install procedure, without the need to actually issue a 'Format' command.
Format by itself can potentially leave residual problems in the drives MBR. Delete/recreate partition doesn't have such potential problems. (that's as I understand it all, anyways.)
Regardless, the notion of 'formatting' a drive to clean it up is a notion which belongs back in the Windows 9x era! Delete/recreate partition is a far preferable approach to take. The relevent 'buttons' are found same place as the 'Format' button, during the Windows install routine."
So you see my concern?
Thanks