Hard Drive Partitioning Q

L

leafhouse

New Member
Hi, I need help totally wiping my hard drive and starting from scratch...I'm okay with computers, but I'm no genius, so could someone help me get my desired hard drive setup?

Current HD setup: a small OEM-created partition for Vista that didn't seem to want me to install Windows 7 RC over it, and a larger partition where I had to install W7 RC which caused Vista to be put in a Windows.old folder. Messy.

Desired HD setup: I'd like to totally wipe my hard drive before setting up a small partition for W7 RC and the remainder of the HD being for everything else. (Although, I'm just assuming that's a wise way to set up one's hard drive, so let me know if you'd advise a different setup. I just basically want to wipe my hard drive and only have W7 RC installed.)


*I have a Toshiba E105 laptop if that's at all helpful to know.
 
Boot to the windows 7 dvd and delete all existing partitions on the drive and then repartition and then install to whatever partition you want. Simple as that.
 
Re

The drive is 320 GB, so I have plenty of space to spare, but from what I'm hearing, it sounds like there's not much benefit in having an OS partition, so I'm thinking of maybe just booting from my W7 RC CD, erasing the partitions and installing 7 on the main hard drive partition, but will that give me a pretty clean hard drive to start off with?
 
johnb35 is correct in that the way to wipe the drive is to boot to the Windows 7 (or other version) cd and use the utility to format the drive and remove all partitions.

The small OEM Vista partition that you couldn't overwrite is probably a system restore created by the manufacturer. Having it allows you to return your system to the same state it was in when it left the factory (meaning all your files would be wiped). You can wipe it if you have no intention of going back, but you might want to let it sit in case of emergency. That's your call.

Having the OS on one small partition and everything else on another, larger partition is a fine setup. You'll want to make sure it has enough room to store system backups and to allow any minor expansion. Also, you may want to make it bigger than you need now so that, if a new version of Windows comes along that you'd like to install, you won't have to format everything again. Also, you'll probably want to redefine the location of shortcuts like the My Documents (or equivalent) folder.

One last thing to consider is that, depending on your HDD usage, you may benefit from two non-OS partitions, which would allow one to act as a back-up for the other. The major benefit to this, other than a file backup (which would not replace a proper backup anyway), is that if you need to expand the OS partition later, you'll have more flexibility for storing files temporarily while repartitioning. Only do this if you don't fill your HDD, though.

Best of luck.
 
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