SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

Bare Foot Kid · 04 Sep 2010

schandler said:

Dear BFK and Dave76

Unless of course you guys know a miracle solution for fixing MS Product keys?

Thanks again for all your help, you guys have been a blessing!!!

Cheers

Stephen

from Richmond, London, England

Hello again Stephen.

You asked and we obliged!

Clean Install with a Upgrade Windows 7 Version

I'm very glad to see you getting this sorted, thanks for the update.

Dave76 · 04 Sep 2010

schandler said:

Dear BFK and Dave76

Almost there! Thanks so much for all the advice.

Anyway a quick update ...

I decided to go for broke and cleaned ALL the discs. This fixed the install issue - THANKS!!!

...
Unless of course you guys know a miracle solution for fixing MS Product keys?

Thanks again for all your help, you guys have been a blessing!!!

Cheers

Stephen

You are welcome.

Glad that you got it installed.

Thanks for letting us know your progress.

BFK gave you a good link on how to proceed.

Any other questions, just ask...

schandler · 04 Sep 2010

Hello again BFK and Dave76

All good!! I followed the link you gave me and Install worked fine - awesome, thanks very much!

Now I've posted another question about sound card drivers, but I thought it was best to put it under "sound and videop cards" so I'm hoping somebody will have the answer to my driver problem. Most stuff installed fine but my sound card doesn't work. Still, I'm very happy with teh W7 install!!

Thanks!

Stephen

Bare Foot Kid · 04 Sep 2010

Hello Stephen, glad you got it running and thanks for the update.

Dave76 · 04 Sep 2010

Hello Stephen, there're a lot of very helpful tutorials here, glad that you got it working.

eldinv · 05 Sep 2010

Nice work, I suppose this also works for Vista?

Bare Foot Kid · 05 Sep 2010

eldinv said:

Nice work, I suppose this also works for Vista?

Hello mate.

I just had a go in VirtualBox with Vista and it will not open a command window using the Shift+F10 key combo as in Option One; you would have to use either the full installer Vista DVD or a repair CD to boot to the recovery options as outlined in Option Two in this tutorial.

Using that method it will work in Vista.

amoretam · 27 Sep 2010

the command to create a primary partition with a given size is: (This example: 100gb's)

create partition primary size=102400 <enter>

Bare Foot Kid · 28 Sep 2010

amoretam said:

the command to create a primary partition with a given size is: (This example: 100gb's)

create partition primary size=102400 <enter>

Thanks, I have gone back and looked this up and you are correct.

rcanino · 04 Oct 2010

Hey BFK - Great tutorial - I've been researching all day for something just like this!
I have a few questions about a brand new build, brand new installation if you would kindly indulge me.

The OS will be Win 7 Pro 64-bit, full retail version from newegg, going onto a 128G Crucial RealSSD that is brand new also.

I have 3 questions Kid:
1) Do I need to write zeros on a brand new drive?
2) What is the smallest partition I can use for Win 7 Pro 64-bit?
3) How do I create 3 partitions using DISKPART? (I assume I should create all 3 in DISKPART...?)

I want to have my OS - all of it, whatever it needs to run including (especially!) that 100MB "system" space - on Partition One. Partition Two will be for my apps and Partition Three will be a scratch / media caches disk (about 40G).

From what I understand a Win 7 install is anywhere from 16-40G, and that a big part of that is the paging file. I've read that Win 7 will create a paging file (or maybe it's the hibernation file?) equal to the amount of RAM installed. I assume a simple workaround for that is to install with just one DIMM. I have 12G of RAM (3x4G) so I'll use one stick to install and reinsert the other 2 once Windows is up and running. Hopefully that works to keep the size down.

I'd like to allocate 28G for the OS partition and have 100G to split between two more partitions, ideally 60/40 or about that. Do you see any problems with that strategy? I'd like to stick close to those numbers if I could.

Thanks so much for any help and advice you can give me. I greatly appreciate it!

Well...that's my story! Hope you don't mind its length...sorry about that. I know you've been so gracious with everyone already, I hope I'm not at the end of your patience. In any case, thanks again for writing such a clear and useful tutorial.

-Richard