need a little advice

stevieg

stevieg

stevieg

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28 Jan 2007
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imgetting a seagate barracuda 7200.10 250gb 16mb cache hdd on saturday and i will be installing vista on it on the same day all being well,
since this is the first time ive installed an os or a hard drive for that matter so im at a loss for what i should do
so is it just a matter of sticking in the hdd connecting the power and data cable,turning on the machine and loading the disc?

any help on this matter will be tremendously appreciated,the most ive dont till now is swap my case and install a few fans
 
Is the drive IDE or SATA and how old is your motherboard?

Reasoning for the questions being that if SATA and an old motherboard then you might need SATA drivers but it really hasn't been much of an issue for a couple of years now. Therefore all you should need to do is connect the cabling and sling the OS CD in then follow the onscreen instructions (you may have to set the boot order in the bios so it boots off the CD to begin with). :)
 
Should be fine then, Intel motherboards tend to be pretty problem-free in this area. Just bung the CD in and follow the instructions as they come up, if you have any problems then just ask and someone can probably guide you through it. :)
 
As you thought - basically get the beast hooked up, fire the machine up with the vista install disk in the drive, it should eventually get to a screen where you can select where you'd like to install to. From this point theres 2 options depending how confident you are:


1) There will be a drive there (about 230ish GB) with "unpartitioned space" enter to select it then it will ask you about partitioning/formatting. At this point personally id split the drive as it makes things a little easier to manage, make a 50ish GB primary partition for windows, it will drop you back to the same screen showing the partition and 180ish GB unpartitioned, select the partition and tell it to format it (full is best) to NTFS, it should then drop straight into the install routine. Follow the on-screen bits and your done.

Once in windows right click on "my computer" and select "manage" go to disk administration and make partitions for games etc in the remaining space.

2) Same as above, 230ish GB drive, select it, make a partition using all available space (default option) format to NTFS and install, you can forget the bit about disk management in windows etc.

My personal setup has always been to make a ~ram x2 sized parition first, drop back to the drive select screen in the windows installer, then make the 50ish GB windows partition and later make a permanent swap file using the max available space in the ramx2 partition. This puts swap on the outer edge (fastest part) of the disk. It DOES make things more fiddly tho so probably something to think about when you can do all the above happily.
Even better is to use multiple drives (windows on one, the small raptors are perfect for this and swap + everything else on a fast raid0) but thats even more complex so worry not :)
 
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Mercutio said:
As you thought - basically get the beast hooked up, fire the machine up with the vista install disk in the drive, it should eventually get to a screen where you can select where you'd like to install to. From this point theres 2 options depending how confident you are:


1) There will be a drive there (about 230ish GB) with "unpartitioned space" enter to select it then it will ask you about partitioning/formatting. At this point personally id split the drive as it makes things a little easier to manage, make a 50ish GB primary partition for windows, it will drop you back to the same screen showing the partition and 180ish GB unpartitioned, select the partition and tell it to format it (full is best) to NTFS, it should then drop straight into the install routine. Follow the on-screen bits and your done.

Once in windows right click on "my computer" and select "manage" go to disk administration and make partitions for games etc in the remaining space.

2) Same as above, 230ish GB drive, select it, make a partition using all available space (default option) format to NTFS and install, you can forget the bit about disk management in windows etc.
Click to expand...
what would be the advantages of creating a seperate partition for windows and then creating a seperate partition again for games with the remaining space
id rather do the easier option but if a little tweaking would increase performance i think i could manage it
 
Personally it just makes things tidy. Windows and serious software gets installed on its own drive. Games go on the next fastest part of the disk and stuff like an incoming downloads folder that will be getting chopped and changed constantly can go in its own on the end (so 3 partitions in this case).

Otherwise you can have situation where you have windows and a couple of games installed, some downloads, more installed games/etc and with downloads being deleted as they are burnt/unpacked you can get quite a fragmented drive. Come installing things on top you get files scattered all over the disk which increases seek time/lowers responsiveness. Sticking games in a "clean" area, windows on its own and having an area thats used for trash/bulk storage would be a little "better".

Its probably not worth getting overly anal about but if you can get your head round it easy enough its fractionally better performance for free.
 
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ok just for my own sanity im going to run through this
so i get the drive out of the box,
nest it in an open slot in my case,
connect power and data cables,
insert vista dvd on startup,
then it will give me the option of where to put it
select the empty drive and it should give me the option for creating a partition(will i have to format the partition for windows when it has been made?)
then when vista is in its own partition just continue with install and when the pc restarts and is up and running create 2 seperate partitions for games and the for the rest of the junk(pics/movies and such)formating them before use

it definately sounds like it could be a benefit

another question though,with both xp and vista on the same pc it will create something called a dual boot,correct? does that mean when i turn on the pc ill have a screen like where i select my username for Os's,like a screen will come up with two boxes,one for xp and another for vista?
does that make any sense at all or am i marching to to the beat of my own drum?

also will i be able to access the data on my xp HDD from vista and vice versa?
 
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