New
#11
Correct, you don't need to use the driver CD, as Windows will automatically find drivers for your hardware. The ones it can't find, you can download from the web.
Recovery Partition and Repair Reinstallation
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New #12
Ouch... $70 for a 250GB HDD!? If theres anyway you can return that and buy a new one, do it! Personally I like LaCie best, but they're usually about 10% more expensive than Seagate and Western Digital.
Newegg.com - Computer Hardware,Hard Drives,External Hard Drives,400GB - 900GB
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New #13
I thought it was a little expensive too for 250GBs. One can get 500GBs for $50. Have a look here. Deals2buy: Storage Devices dealsLast edited by whs; 19 Apr 2010 at 14:46. Reason: typo
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New #14
$20 isn't bad, probably just the shipping+Handling in their minds. I'd verify again that it is a clean copy of Win7 without the bloatware, just Gateway branding and maybe a few drivers at the most.
MS spent a fortune building Win7 drivers with manufacturers so it would have them in the installer or quickly via optional Windows Updates. This was partly done to keep manufacturers from holding out so we are forced to buy newer hardware, but the net result is you rarely need to add more than a driver or two. I'd still have my wireless driver on hand if needed to get connected quickly to Windows Updates.
Get Adobe Reader and Flash, Java Runtime (maybe free Ofc suite) off their sitess. Maybe Gateway still provides an applications and drivers disk so you can save favorite apps.Last edited by gregrocker; 19 Apr 2010 at 21:01.
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New #15
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New #16
I'm saying this just to let whomever know that my question has been answered, and for anyone who stumbles on this thread with the same questions I had.
So, I've reinstalled the OS from a clean version of Windows (an ISO file and ISO burning software) and it's working well. This part only took an hour or two. Windows 7 sure is quicker to reinstall than my last experience (Windows XP). And, I didn't use the recovery partition.
Also, I used Partition Wizard to create a root partition smaller than was allowable by the Windows partitioning utility. Actually, it was a little "fun" because the free version of partition magic doesn't allow you to merge partitions, just split them, delete them, and create them, so when I shrunk the C-partition, I had 100GB left of unallocated space. I successfully used the moving and splitting features in partition wizard with the merging features in Diskpart (the second method). Now it's all good...
Now that I have all the drivers and other main software reinstalled, I just have to image the disk according to the instructions in an earlier post of this thread. Thanks for all the help!
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New #17
Great, thanks for posting for others. I'm sure someone will appreciate down the road.
Let us know if you need anything else.
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New #18
That sure sounds like a success story. Thanks for posting the result. And image as often as you can (I do it daily). One day it will save your bacon.
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New #19
WHS, not to hijack the thread, but I did my first system image with Macrium on Sunday. Went smoothly and without a hitch. I did create the rescue disk and successfully booted from it. After I do a couple of more, I will delete my Windows created images.
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New #20
Carl, here is how I use Macrium (but any other good imaging program would do the same). Maybe it gives you some ideas.
I make a daily image of my system and data partitions at boot-up. I have set Macrium to do that automatically. It takes only 9 minutes from my SSD to the internal HDD. Every Sunday, I copy the Sunday image to an on-line external disk into a "weekly folder". Every first of the month I also copy the last image to an external disk "monthly folder" that usually stays off-line. That way I have a whole history all the way back to the initial installation.
In addition I have two 16GB sticks to which I copy my data every 3 months and put it into my bank safe. 3 months later I retrieve the first stick and deposit the latest data copy on the second stick, and so on.
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