To make sure your new Operating System install is completely clean without any traces of older OS, you need to make sure your storage device is properly formatted. If you install a new OS without formatting the drive, your old files will still exist. During installation, windows xp/vista/7 offer to reformat the drive upon installation. The installation is very user friendly, when the screen comes up that shows you the partitions and different storage devices, click on more options or if it already appears, select the windows partition or all partitions on the current storage device you want wiped, and click on delete. The partitions tables are deleted. The formatting that the windows installation offers is formatted instantly. The option of a quick format just deletes the partitions tables and thats it, any files aren't deleted, they are just ignored and as far as the storage device and OS are concerned, don't exist. The long version of the format, does the same thing as the quick version does except it goes through every block of the drive and scans it to make sure its operating correctly. A real format, one that literally goes through every single block of the magnetic storage platter and writes 0 to it and deletes everything on it would require third party software and will take a long time. On modern hard-drives this is a useless process. If your drive is new and in good shape. I recommend you quick format it, by first deleting the existing partition table which takes seconds and then creating a new NTFS partition which also takes seconds, you then install Windows 7 into that partition. If you just delete the partitions and don't make new ones and continue installing Windows 7, it will automatically format and create a partition for itself as required, i actually recommend using this method as creating your partition manually doesn't always work for some reason, i have had friends saying it doesn't. Good Luck
Let me know if you have any questions.
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