XP 32-bit to Windows 7 64-bit: First time OS installer

[Kua]

Managed to get hold of Win 7 Premium 64-bit for the princely sum of nothing through MSDNAA at my uni. Currently I have XP 32-bit and though I'm eager to enter the world of Win 7 I'm petrified of something going wrong.

ATM my storage is a very messy - now's a good time to organise things .

My C drive (160GB) has my OS install and various programs installed on it as well as various files.
My E drive (160GB) also has various installs and a few movies etc.
My F drive (1TB) has yet more installs and loads of movies and all my music.

Now I will have to format one of these drives and install Win 7 on it won't I? Or another option is to create a second partition on one of the drives and install Win 7 on it... This has an appeal, because just in case anything goes wrong I can still boot into XP. (How does that work exactly? At what point do you choose which OS to boot up?)

But say I was to reformat the C drive and lose XP, that would make all my install files on the other drives redundant wouldn't it? And I could just delete them... probably better to uninstall them while I still have XP though...

I can't really decide what to do. I've only got 8 gig left on the C drive so its probably not too wise to install a second OS there. But it could get confusing if I install it to another drive. Or may be not.

Heads swimming a bit here!

 

[theheyes]

Personally, I would make an inventory of things I wanted to re-install and then uninstall everything. This should free space on the E and F drives giving you somewhere to put the files you wish to keep off the C drive. The C drive will now be ready to erase and you can install Windows 7 on this.

After Windows 7 installs you should be able to see the contents of the E and F drives and you'll be able to reinstall the applications you wish to use. Some people like to install to different drives but I prefer to keep it all on the primary drive and use others to store files.

 

[Kua]

Personally, I would make an inventory of things I wanted to re-install and then uninstall everything. This should free space on the E and F drives giving you somewhere to put the files you wish to keep off the C drive. The C drive will now be ready to erase and you can install Windows 7 on this.

After Windows 7 installs you should be able to see the contents of the E and F drives and you'll be able to reinstall the applications you wish to use. Some people like to install to different drives but I prefer to keep it all on the primary drive and use others to store files.

Sounds sensible. Thank you.

I also like the idea of having all my installs on the same drive. I'll try to make the F drive my OS drive (and re-name it to C). I can back up everything on there to a 1TB external HDD I have.

You wouldn't believe the amount of crap I'm uninstalling. It'll be great to make a clean start

 

[Lakeland]

One thing to add, I always unplug storage hard drives when formatting / installing a new OS. A while back I did a format C: and it wiped out my D: storage drive, never again

 

[Kua]

One thing to add, I always unplug storage hard drives when formatting / installing a new OS. A while back I did a format C: and it wiped out my D: storage drive, never again

Yikes. Thanks for the heads up. Might just back everything up to the external HDD. There's plenty of space.

 

[Lakeland]

no need to back it all up just take the cables out of the back of the hard drives then the drives can't be mixed up / data lost

 

[Kua]

Just a quick question. Do I format the hard drive before installing the new OS? I want to create at least three partitions (would be nice to have a linux OS and a Mac OS). Roughly what size should the second two partitions be, bearing in mind I think I'll use my 1TB drive as my primary drive. Also is there any advantage to creating other partitions.

When I'm ready to format, do I do it within XP in drive manager (creating the partitions at the same time). This doesn't make sense somehow because I'm wiping the XP install.