Need some help going from Vista to 7.

madcratebuilder said:

Troyzer66 said:

What's up people? First post here, I need some help with this.
I'm not a super computer nerd, but I know enough. This is just something I want a second opinion on. So I have this pretty old HP laptop running Vista separate from my gaming rig and it's fairly clogged up with viruses, corrupted data etc. I wanted to upgrade to Windows 7, wipe the hard drive and start over. Because it's specs aren't bad for what I use it for, mainly just browsing and watching movies. My girlfriend is studying computer science so she gave me access to her account. For those of you who don't know, dreamspark is a Microsoft program that they use to give free software to students. So I was able to get a completely legit Windows 7. Had to download it and burn the image to a DVD. Now here's the tricky bit. I don't have the original master disc for my laptop and I've never had to do a complete system wipe before. I know that there is software out there that'll wipe your hard drive for you but my question is what order should I do it in?
I'm not sure if deleting my hard drive will stop me from installing Windows 7 or not because I want a genuinely pristine, empty hard drive with a brand new OS to start over again. What do you think?
Cheers!

*Should probably mention that I have a copy of Norton ready to go once I'm up and running with Windows 7 and I can use Dreamspark to stock up again on all of the software I'll have lost so I literally want EVERYTHING gone.*

The best thing you can do with that is give to someone other than a friend.

What do you mean?

Alright, good news and bad news!
Good news is, it went pretty smoothly. Just made a copy of all of the essential drivers on my USB and went ahead and formatted my hard drives during installation.
Bad news is, my laptop seems to only recognize the partition of my hard drive that contains Windows 7.
Any suggestions? There's over 100GB of hard drive space that seems to have vanished!

Press start, right click computer, press manage, press disk management, and post a screen shot.

Alonso Chocano said:

Press start, right click computer, press manage, press disk management, and post a screen shot.

Yeah, I figured that out an hour or two ago. Now I have yet another problem. My two partitions are now currently recognised. But now my entire directory is geared towards the smaller one. All of my program files and installation default settings are set to the smaller hard drive. Any ideas? Best case scenario I can send all of my user files, program files etc to the bigger partition. Leaving only Windows 7 itself on the smaller one. Then I can just change the settings in my directory but this isn't working so far. My program files are now split between the two of them because stupidly I've already tried to send them across but only some of them will. And now they won't go back!!
I'll post a few screen shots. C is the smaller drive in this case, E is the large drive.

That is not Disk mgmt. Type Disk Management in Start Search box, maximize the window to take a screenshot of the entire window, just like it says clearly in Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image.

Did you unplug all other HD's and boot the installer as it says in Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7?

Then during a Custom Install, did you use the Drive Options pictured in Steps 7 and 8 of Clean Install Windows 7 to delete all partitions and either Create New and Format or just click Next to let the installer do it for you?

If you didn't do these most basic steps or aren't otherwise following the tutorials like you ignored the Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image steps which couldn't be clearer, then I would do it over. This time read over every step of Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 and ask back if you have any questions.

gregrocker said:

That is not Disk mgmt. Type Disk Management in Start Search box, maximize the window to take a screenshot of the entire window, just like it says clearly in Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image.

Did you unplug all other HD's and boot the installer as it says in Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7?

Then during a Custom Install, did you use the Drive Options pictured in Steps 7 and 8 of Clean Install Windows 7 to delete all partitions and either Create New and Format or just click Next to let the installer do it for you?

If you didn't do these most basic steps or aren't otherwise following the tutorials like you ignored the Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image steps which couldn't be clearer, then I would do it over. This time read over every step of Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 and ask back if you have any questions.

To answer your question, I assumed he wanted me to open up device manager to see if it was there. I had already realised that and sorted it out. I have attached a screenshot anyway. I don't have any external hard drives to attach. But I did unplug all peripherals. What I did was format both partitions of the hard drive and installed Windows 7 onto the smaller one. Other than that, I just clicked next at every step. When I booted up, only the smaller of the two was there. I went into device management and saw that the bigger part wasn't actually designated. So I just named it E.
It didn't let me create a new partition so I just went along with what was there. Doing it again probably isn't going to change that.

gregrocker said:

That's a real mess. It looks like the boot files were written to a huge data partition at the front of the drive, where the paging file also was somehow assigned, while the OS is in a tiny 11gb partition at the end of the HD. Can you see that?

It really needs to be done over, deleting all partitions during Clean Install Windows 7 .

The only way I can see to salvage it is to shrink E to 200mb to fashion a System Reserved boot partition, after moving the Paging File back to C. Use Partition Wizard Move/Resize Partition - Video Help to shrink E and then drag the left border of C to the left to take up all of the shrink space. You'd then remove the E drive letter so it can be a true System Reserved partition marked only System Active Primary, while C is now marked Boot (meaning presently booted), Page File, Primary.

Sigh, I'd thought as much. I'll just reinstall it again then. So you're saying destroy the partition and set up a new one during installation? I just went along with the install wizard. Why does Microsoft always have terrible instructions?
Thanks, I'll give it a go.

Follow the illustrated steps in Clean Install Windows 7.

Always delete all partitions during install using Drive Options in Steps 7/8. Then create and format New there, or if you have no partition scheme in mind just highlight Unallocated Space and click Next to have the installer do it for you.

In addition read over these steps for Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7
which are the same for retail and collect everything that works best so you will end up with a perfect install, and keep it that way as long as you stick with the tools and methods given.