Windows 7 over XP

soundklinik · 06 Nov 2011

Greetings everybody, my first post here...
I am still on XP-SP3 and just bought W-7 64bits.

My question is this: I have XP on a Samsung disc on C, 80GB partition.
I bought a new Western Digital disc. I want to install W7 on the new WD disc and get rid off XP, which is on the Samsung disc and recuperate that C partition.

I could unplug the Sata cable to Samsung disc and install W-7 on WD?
How do I go about the UN-installation of XP?
is there a better way to do all this?
TIA

Corazon · 06 Nov 2011

It depends - it's not clear what you want to do with the two harddisks. Do you want to add the WD drive to your system or replace the Samsung drive with it?

The safest way would be to connect your WD and disconnect the Samsung, then proceed with installing Windows 7 on the WD drive.
After it's up and running, disconnect the WD and reconnect the Samsung. Then boot the Windows setup DVD again and go to the command prompt. Use diskpart and the clean command to remove all boot information from the Samsung drive and essentially destroy Windows XP.

Once that's done, you can either reconnect the WD or connect both drives, boot your new Windows 7, and create and format a new partition on the Samsung to use it for data storage or backups.

soundklinik · 06 Nov 2011

Thank you Corazon for a speedy and precise answer.
I should have been clearer on the discs.
I want to add the new WD disc, partition it in two: C:/200GB programs and D:/ 300GB backups, storage music films.
The 2nd old disc, (also 500GB), for audio samples and sample banks only.
So I will end up with 2 physical 500GB discs

This is the interesting part:

After it's up and running, disconnect the WD and reconnect the Samsung. Then boot the Windows setup DVD again and go to the command prompt. Use diskpart and the clean command to remove all boot information from the Samsung drive and essentially destroy Windows XP.

Scares me a bit...

Thanx for your help

Corazon · 06 Nov 2011

Sorry if I went over your head with the diskpart stuff. :) The following tutorial should answer all your questions in detail:

www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1649-clean-install-windows-7-a.html

whs · 06 Nov 2011

Disconnect the old disk > install W7 on the new disk > reconnect the old disk > boot into W7 > delete the XP partition on the old disk in Disk Management - or reformat the old disk.

essenbe · 06 Nov 2011

whs said:

Disconnect the old disk > install W7 on the new disk > reconnect the old disk > boot into W7 > delete the XP partition on the old disk in Disk Management - or reformat the old disk.

That will work good, but be sure to change boot order in bios to tell it which drive to boot from.

whs · 06 Nov 2011

essenbe said:

whs said:

Disconnect the old disk > install W7 on the new disk > reconnect the old disk > boot into W7 > delete the XP partition on the old disk in Disk Management - or reformat the old disk.

That will work good, but be sure to change boot order in bios to tell it which drive to boot from.

Thanks for adding that. One always assumes too much.

rraod · 06 Nov 2011

I would like to add here.

After reconnecting the old disk, boot in to windows 7 from new disk, you have two options.

Backup all the valid data from the old disk, C: (80GB) and remaining partition(s) (~400-420GB) to the new disk's second partition (D:?), then from disk management, remove all the old disk's partitions and create just one partition and format it to NTFS.

or

Backup all the valid data from the old disk's C: and mark it not active and format it to NTFS.

soundklinik · 08 Nov 2011

Thank you all for your help.

I want to recuperate the C partition from the old disc, (now w. XP), reformat it and use it, if I am not mistaken, the first part of an HD is the fastest.

As per partitioning the NEW disc, I plan 200GB for W7 and 300GB for documents, storage etc. and I want to keep only programs, nothing else on the 200GB partition. Isn't 200 GB a bit too large? Or it doesn't really matter?

And thanks for the link to the tutorials...very useful
cheers:)

rraod · 08 Nov 2011

It depends on what programs and how many programs you wish to install. I feel 100GB is fair enough for windows 7. You will need more space on your second partition for data. Usually people run out of space soon on the data partition.

Otherwise you can keep 200GB for C: and in future you run out of space on the 300GB partition, you can always shrink the C: partition and grow the 300GB partition.