Solved Advice re Win7 x64 installation problem on Dell T5400

[karlsnooks]

they look unusual to me, but I never, never, never use raid on a home system.

I think GregRocker was the one who asked for them.

If you have already gotten rid of your raid setup, then let me know and I'll advise, but I'd rather that Greg came in since I'm sure he had something in mind when he requested the display.

 

[Night Hawk]

Other then the 63mb at the front end of both Disk 0 and Disk 2 being OEM I don't see any other problem as far as a single OS partitioning scheme. Here however I would have cleaned off one drive at a time in order to nuke the 63mb since no factory recovery partition is that small.

The 63mb isn't any large amount of drive space to worry about except for wanting to clean the partitioning up prior to OSing either of the two drives.

 

[gregrocker]

I'm not sure what you did there that caused the Win7 boot files for C to wind up on F - other than not unplug the other HD's during install. They should be written to the first Active partition.

I'm also not sure why you left the small OEM partition in place in the valuable lower address (left side) of the HD. Is this a Dell Diagnostic tools partition which you know for sure runs from boot - test it now to see by tapping the F12 key at boot to choose Diagnostics.

To write the System boot files to C, unplug all other HD's, enter BIOS setup to set Win7 HD first HD to boot, boot the Win7 installer to run Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times until Win7 boots on its own and holds the System Active Boot flags.

Or you can follow these steps to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.

The other two HD's appear to contain OS's. Do you wish to keep them? If not move the data off and wipe each one with Diskpart Clean Command before partitioning as you wish in Disk Mgmt.

 

[Night Hawk]

The first drive came with Vista and the second saw 7 while the boot files and information remained on the first drive. If he wants to keep on the same drive all he would need to do is build a new BCD store on the second drive with the other two unplgged especially the first with Vista preinstalled on it.

As far as the 63mb OEM partition that is seen on two drives not just the one Vista is on. The first thing now would be simply backing things up if he still wants 7 on the other drive Vista came preinstalled on and nuking all three! With two drives those will need to be repartitioned once cleaned.

If You want the 100mb System Reserved partition or not after will depend on what option you decide to use in order to create the brand new primary for 7 if planning another clean install. With a raw unpartitioned drive after using the clean command in the DiskPart tool the drive tools on the 7 dvd and installer will see to it the 100mb partition that holds the BCD store(boot configuration) and boot files is created being separate from the main C primary.

You didn't see that the first time due to installing 7(by accident) onto a drive already partitioned and formatted. For now seeing a clean install of 7 on the OEM host drive instead that would need to be cleaned off entirely and new primary created and formatted prior to the new 7 install to avoid seeing the 100mb SR partition created.

As for drivers for devices and hardwares most Vista 64bit will work without problem on the 64bit 7. The two versions are close in compatibility there.

 

[karlsnooks]

Unterberg,
Let us know when you have completed the advice given to you by GregRocker.

 

[Unterberg]

Ok. I have finally had time to continue working on this.
I did a clean install as in the instructions with all the performance recommendations/updates/backups etc.

Managed to clean the 2 Hitachi drives and did put a system recovery on both drives after I installed all my software and done the performance tweaks so that I can reinstall windows again easily.

Everything is working well.

 

[karlsnooks]

Thanks for the feedback and glad to hear that all is well.

 

[gregrocker]

If there is nothing else, you can mark the thread Solved at top.

 

[Unterberg]

I have learned a lot and your help was highly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[gregrocker]

You're welcome. We're glad to help.