New WD 640 Black drive

[chicago30]

Can someone walk me thru installing windows 7 on a new hard drive.

Do I format the drive first or does Windows do that and what else do i need to know.

Thanks

 

[buwish]

When you boot from the disk (I assume you have a CD/DVD), windows will show you the drives on your system. Chose the drive you want and Windows will probably tell you that it needs to be formatted. It should then give you an option to do so right there (If I recall correctly). Format to NTFS and you should be good to go.

 

[chicago30]

Ok so I just run the Windows DVD and it will format. How big of a partion do I need to allocate?

 

[buwish]

At least 16GB for 32-bit and 20GB for 64-bit.

 

[4745454b]

I would just make a cool 50GB. This way you'll have some extra room if you need it. Allocate everything else into another drive or two.

 

[chicago30]

What if I just use the whole thing, will i still have storage space? (C: Drive)

 

[4745454b]

Yes, but if you ever need to format your OS drive, you'll lose all your data files. By putting all my data files (.jpg, .avi, .mpg, .doc, etc) on a second partition, I can safely format my OS drive and not have to back everything up first.