Hi All - so I'm upgrading from 32-bit Vista to Win 7 64-bit. I know I need to backup all my data and completely wipe my drive clean.
My question is this, and it's probably an easy one to answer: I have two hard drives, one of which has the OS, the other obviously does not. I only have to wipe the drive that will have the OS on it, correct? Should I disconnect the 2nd hard drive while wiping/installing 7 just in case?
Thanks in advance for the help.
You only have to format the 1 drive. To be as safe as possible though, disconnecting the secondary during the install certainly cannot hurt.
There is no need to wipe. Just install it in the partition where the 32bit is currently. If you make that active first (and deactivate the 100MB partition), you will not get the dreaded 100MB active partition.
And yes, unplugging the other drive during the installation is a good idea.
Do you have a Vista Recovery Partition?
Can you post a screen shot of Disk management?
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Hello slice17, welcome to Seven Forums!
Here's a lot of very useful information below.
After you have copied out or made back-ups of the data you need to save to external media, then boot the Windows 7 installation media to use Step One of this tutorial at the first link below to do a wipe (secure erase) to the entire Hard Disk Drive / Solid State Drive.
Whether you use diskpart to run either the clean all command to completely wipe a HDD / SSD or just the clean command to remove the format configuration data and don't use diskpart to create at least a single partition to do the installation to, letting the Windows installer do the format you will end up with the new Windows 7 System Reserved partition, if you want to make your own decision whether this partition is added, study these two (2) options below.
Either way, running the "clean all" then creating and formatting the partition(s) using diskpart will get you the best possible space to do a clean install of Windows 7 to; you can always extend the Windows partition to include the remaining unallocated space on the HDD / SSD or create additional Primary partitions or an Extended partition after the installation completes if you choose.
- Then if you do not want to create the new Windows 7 "System Reserved" partition use the outline in Step Two #2 to create, format and mark Active a single 100GB partition to do the installation to.
- If you do want to create the "System Reserved" partition use the outline in Step Two #3 to create, format and mark Active the System Reserved partition and then create and format the 100GB partition to do the installation to.
SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation
DISKPART : At PC Startup
Do a Clean Install with a Upgrade Windows 7 Version
If you don't want to wipe the entire HDD, you can do a partition-specific wipe of the Windows partition using the Partition Wizard Bootable Disk (PWBD) have a look at Option Three in the tutorial at this link below.
Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD
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