Help formatting drives and installing Vista?

[refractoryman]

I'll be receiving the parts to start my new i7 920 build shortly. I am going to install (3) hard drives in a non raid set up. My "C" boot and App's drive is a SATA 640gb Western Digital Black hdd. Data files and back-ups and so on will be stored on (2) SATA 1gb Western Digital Black hdd's. The mb is a ASUS P6T SE with 6gb ram. OS is Vista Home Premium 64bit. My question is how to get started once I put the rig together? Do I need to set the bios to boot in any special order? Do I install one SATA drive at a time? Do the drives need to be formatted first? Should the "C" drive be partioned?............ As you can see I am week in this area and really need some help. Is there somewhere in Tom's Hardware with step by step instructions or another site to reference? Your help and advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[Outlander_04]

only install the boot drive for now [ or just leave the power connectors out of the data drives ]

later once its running then add the data drives and format them from windows