Questions concerning secondary drives after clean 7 install.

Globber

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Jan 30, 2014
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18,695
Hey guys. So, my OS drive just crashed. My first time having it happen so the pc post-nuclear meltdown is new to me. My questions are about my hard drive partitions. When my OS drive failed and my OS went down, all of my drive letters were reset. I purchased a new SSD drive from Toshiba, and ran a clean Windows 7 install. I went back into the system and something just seems a little bit off with them, they are pulling a little on the slow side. The OS seems to be booting and running faster than ever(even faster than the old SSD that failed on me). In device manager it says I can eject the drives now whereas that was not an option before the system crash. The secondary drives are used for different purposes, and are meant to be permanent. WD 640 GB HDD for backup, 240 GB for DRM game clients(Steam/Origin/Uplay)/high demand games, and a 2 TB Seagate Barracuda for less demanding games, movies, music and other storage.
So questions:

1. Do I need to reformat or change settings somewhere for the drives for them to be properly configured with the fresh Win7 install, since they were already installed? Data on these drives and games and files are all fine, and I manually changed the drive lettering back to the original in disk manager.

2. If I do need to reformat these drives, do I need to completely delete and reformat them or can I do it without having to uninstall my clients and games?

3. Is there a way to backup my system in case of a future crash so that I can still run a clean install again and not worry about my drive directories changing? After my research I have decided that the only way I would reinstall my system ever again would be from a fresh run, rather than a back-up. So I do not want to back up my OS, just the settings, directories and registries.

Thanks in advance!!
 

Globber

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Jan 30, 2014
203
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18,695
Thank you for the input. There were just these subtle differences that were not there before the crash. Clean install only took me a couple hours(mostly due to slower internet) so I am not worried about doing that way for the future. The drives seem to be functioning just fine, and I learned the proper way to format my OS drive this time around. I just need to run the first time executions on the files and after they update my files seem to be running as normal. Thanks again!!