Clean Install Windows 7

bowman321 said:

i have 3 hdd installed, is it best to diconnect the 2 i am not going to install on

Yes. Only have the disk to be installed to, connected.

Yes, thats correct.

In used this tutorial to get rid of my years of misuse. Worked great except for some steps that I screwed up on.They are the steps concerning partitions. I wound up with a "System Recover" parition and in my attemps to get rid of it I added an unallocated partition.Now I have 4 partitios on drive O. I only want two. How can I get rid of the two umarked ( no drive letters) partitions so that I wind up only with two partitions on drive 0?

Hello Mariner,

Please go ahead and post a screenshot of your Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) window showing the full layout of your hard drives.

Since you deleted the "System Reserved/recovery ?" partition, be sure that you DO NOT restart or shut down your computer. That partition may have been your boot partition, and Windows will not boot at startup now if so. If you do by mistake, then you may be able to get Windows to boot by running a Startup Repair possibly up to 3 times if Windows does not boot.

Thanks Brink for looking at this. A screenshot is attached.I want to delete the reserve partition as well as the unallocated space and put it all into the large partition.
By the way, I have rebooted several times without any problems.

Do you want to move your boot files to the C:\ from the system reserved partition ? And then merge the unallocated space with the system reserved partition ?

C:\ does say boot on it but the system reserved partition is your active partition

To make your system partition viewable do this

Open up your cmd with admin rights. Press on the start menu type in cmd right click on cmd and choose Run as Administrator

Type in Diskpart

list disk

select disk 0
list partition
select partition 1 ( if this is the system reserved partition )
detail partition
set id=7

To add a drive letter to System Reserved partition

use Disk Management to assign a drive letter to it:

Click the Start button.
Right-click on Computer.
Click on Manage in the pop-up menu. Computer Management will open.
Click on Disk Management in the tree on the left side.
Right-click on the System Reserved partition and select Change Drive Letter and Paths... from the pop-up menu.


Open another Command Prompt with Administrator Rights

Type the commands and press enter after each command

reg unload HKLM\BCD00000000

robocopy H:\ c:\ bootmgr

( H:\ is your System Reserved )

robocopy e:\Boot C:\Boot /s

( To verify that the files been copied )

Type this

dir c:\ /ah

bcdedit /store c:\boot\bcd /set {bootmgr} device partition=C:

Return to Disk Management (in the Computer Management window).
Right-click on the System Reserved partition and select Change Drive Letter and Paths... from the pop-up menu.
Click the Remove button.
Click the Yes button to confirm the change.
Right-click on the Windows 7 partition and select Mark Partition as Active from the pop-up menu.
Click the Yes button to confirm the change. You should see the Active tag move from the System Reserved partition to the Windows 7 partition.
Close the Computer Management window.

Restart computer and you should be booting off your C:\ drive not your " System Reserved " partition.

VistaKing said:

Do you want to move your boot files to the C:\ from the system reserved partition ? And then merge the unallocated space with the system reserved partition ?

What I want is only two partitions, the C drive which I will boot from and the E drive(which I will later change the drive letter to D). The existing unallocated space and any recovered from system reserved be put into the existing E drive. The result would be only two partitions on the disk.
I'll hold off on making any changes until I hear from you.

Mariner,

Depending on how much you would have to reinstall, it may be easier to boot from your Windows 7 installation DVD/USB, delete the "System Reserved" and "C" partitions. This will merge all 3 as one "unallocated space" to the left of your "E" partition.

Next, format the "unallocated space", and select it to do the clean install of Windows 7 on.

This will give you one C: partition on the left with the E: still intact on the right.

Afterwards, you'll just need to install all of your drivers, Windows Updates, programs, and such again in Windows 7.

It may be a bit more work, but you will have a much cleaner and better installation.

If you decide to this, then be sure to backup anything you do not want to lose first.