Tom's Hardware > Forum > Storage > Hard Disks > Partitions.. again
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Discord   10-09-2009 at 07:32:41 PM

Hi all,

I have a simple setup.

Two HDDs. I'll call them primary and secondary although I don't think we call them that these days!!

Primary = C 40gb (Win XP and applications) and D 250gb (games)
Secondary = E 500gb (storage)

When I get Win 7 what would you consider to be my best approach? Both drives are identicle speeds and makes, one is just bigger than the other. I was thinking of adding a partition to my second drive and installing the new OS onto it.

not sure if this is the best thing to do or if i'll lose data on an existing drive by playing with partitions - certainly used to in the olden days.

Help??

Oh, and I'll be going for 64bit, have an Intel Dual Core E6600 with 4 gb ram.

I don't mind re-installing all my apps (prolly have to anyway upgrading to 64bit)

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sub mesa   10-09-2009 at 07:44:13 PM
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If you want to keep the XP partition on your C drive, you can create a new partition on your E drive, do you get E (40GB) and F (~460GB), where E is the partition for Windows 7.

However, i vaguely remember Windows 7 requiring a 30MB system partition on the first harddrive; so if this doesn't work for some reason try to disconnect your primary drive as you're installing windows 7 to the secondary drive. You may need to setup a boot manager; for example i often use GAG (google on this).

------------------------------ ...man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.
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Discord   10-09-2009 at 07:50:45 PM
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I was thinking of a 100gb partition for Win7. But thats perhaps not really relevant at the mo.

What I think I'm confused about is the drive lettering. If I create a new partition on E it will be called F. It'll be 100gb big and effectively "at the end of" the drive.

How does this then become C and the start of the drive????

ya know what. I think I may just get a 1tb external drive, backup everything onto it, format my two existing drives and just start again!

Sounds much easier. About time I formatted my drives too.

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sub mesa   10-09-2009 at 07:58:15 PM
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You can do this without backing up with Partition Magic / GParted, but i recommend against it. Ive lost data this way and won't be sacrificing any more by using these applications. Just backup your stuff, and re-partition the secondary drive; creating a 100GB partition at the start, and a larger partition at the end of the drive.

------------------------------ ...man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.
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west w   10-13-2009 at 04:29:19 AM
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In fact, after installing and booting from Win 7, you need not do anything to make the win 7 system partition become C. Windows will atomatically assign drive letter C to it. You may repartition your hdd in an easy way with freeware easeus partition master home.

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