I am very lost, I have a IBM ThinkPad T42 with an older 20Gig hard drive that is blank, no OS on it, nothing at all. I tried to perform a custom clean install of Windows 7 and get to the part where you can format the drive or install drivers. When I select to install the drivers it can never find any.
What am I doing wrong? I know a little but I guess not enough, do I need to install fro somewhere else? and what drivers is it looking for?
I have a 320 gb hardrive which is split into 2 partitions at the moment, C and D. Unfortunately, my C drive, which has Windows XP installed on it at the moment, is only 15gb. I know I need atleast 20GB for a Windows 7 64-bit installation.
As I don't have access to another drive or a large enough USB to back my files up in at the moment, I was wondering if I should just follow the guide here and install Windows 7 in my D drive instead. The thing I wanted to confirm was this:
I read in this thread that if I install Windows 7 on D drive, it'll read the drive it is installed on as C. Is that true? Because I was wondering if I could just install Windows 7 in D drive and then format C which has XP in it (but none of my data).
Then I could rename the blank drive to D. Is this scenario possible? To cut a long story short, I want to install Windows 7 on my PC, get rid of XP, but my C drive is only 15gb and my D drive has all my data (movies, pictures, documents etc) in it.
I am looking to use my 1TB seagate SATA II drive for my Windows 7 installation, and was wondering how I should go about partitioning it and how large each partition should be or what I sould put on each partition.
My system will be used for the following:
Computer Games that take up a lot of space (World In Conflict, Empire Total War, Battlefield 2, Call of Duty, etc.)
Music
Video files/ recordings (I have a Hauppauge tv card)
Some Photos
Basic apps like office
Data files
Which of the above items should I put on the OS partition, and which should get their own partitions? How large should the OS partition be compared to the other partitions? Seperate partition for games?
Having one giant drive might be nice to try, but then I would have no where to put my excess video files if I ever needed to reformat. The 1TB drive accomodates whatever video files I can't store on my 2 smaller drives and currently has 120 GB of video on it.
In addition to my 1TB drive, I also have 2 more internal drives, a 250GB Maxtor ATA which is filled with video files and a 200GB WD SATA that I use for my TV card and storing the recordings I make until I have a chance to edit them or move them to a differet drive.
I have a seperate 250GB external drive for backing up data files and music, so the backup issue is taken care of.
i have xp at the moment and upgrading to Windows 7 64bit. but i don't have access to an external hard drive so i can store my data with windows easy transfer
i also have 2 hard drives with one completely empty and one with all my data.
is it possible to just unplug the one with all my data and install windows 7 normally on my empy one and then just replug it in? since i don't have an external would this be a good alternative or possible _at_ all?
I'm trying to set up the Backup to an internal hard drive called Z: After originally installing win 7 64bit, I had to manually assign a drive letter to the hd before windows would see it. This HD has nothing on it and is not used often so its perfect for my windows backup. However, when I start the backup setup - it does not list that hard drive in my options to backup to. When I manually goto CMD to run "wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:f: -include:c:" it gives me the error saying the HD is read-only and cannot store backups.
Under disk management, I am not allowed to reformat the z: drive - it says "Windows cannot format the system partition on this disk." It lists the Z: drive as being system, active, primary partition - WHY DOES WINDOWS THINK IT IS THE SYSTEM HD? It has 100% free space according to diskmanagement.
I ran a chkdsk on z: (it is still going on step 5) and there doesn't seem to be any errors yet :/ Any suggestions?
hard drive registers in BIOS, but not in the windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit installation screen. Any questions I will answer RIGHT away. Oh dear God please help me. I took it in to a repair shop and I think I knew more than they did and left without any substantive help (but a $40 bill ). Do I need to format the HD? Would drivers help? All the websites say everything should be compatible - no problem - but nothing here.
WD Blue 640 GB (single HDD) AMD Phenom ii GA-MA785GM-US2H Gigabyte motherboard OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
I found another old hard drive, a Seagate 250 GB, and when I plug it to the pc, Windows is stuck at the Windows 7 logo at the boot, and the logo itself lags. the hard drive is detected in the BIOS. (can it be a virus on this old hard drive?)
I already have Windows 7 installed on my laptop, and now I am trying to fix a laptop in my house that has had a virus on it for a while that corrupted XP (about 8 months it has had it).
then when running a setup for XP to try and fix it it corrupted itself and then got permanently stuck on a setup. so now I started looking at it and I saw that there was an option for it to revert to the way it was when it had working settings.
so I am uninstalling everything and deleting everything
but I want to format it completely (so there will be NOTHING left)
so can I do a full format while using the Windows 7 Ultimate disc?
please don't say to do a quick format since I don't want to do that, I have been reading some of the posts in the forums and people say to use a quick format and they don't say if you can do a Full format.
I'm in IT (surprise surprise) and I have extra hard drives coming out my ears. I want to move my Win RC x64 install to a larger hard drive.
Whats the easiest way to do this? I know its possible, I used to ghost XP machines at the local highschool (dont fret, they were all licensed).
I'm toying with the concept of making a fresh install, and doing something to the effect of a system restore to it, or something like that.
On a slightly less related note, my system is more powerful a machine than i ever expected to own two years ago. Its a core i7 machine with 12gb of ram and Windows 7 installed on a raptor. Why doesn't a fresh install of Windows 7 simply fly? Sure, multitasking can be done almost infinitely (lol), but there's literally no speed increase in app startup times, opening "my computer" or the device manager. None of it works as quickly or smoothly as i would have thought.
Also, again, where can i find a simple list of changes between RC and RTM?
I built a new computer. Rather expensive, but it should perform well. -Anyway-, I bought a brand new hard drive with the expectation of installing windows 7 on it and then working from there. The hard drive is recognized in the BIOS, the CMOS, and anything at all I've checked, but when I put the windows 7 64 bit disk in and try to do a custom install, seeing as I have nothing on the disk from which to upgrade, my hard drive does not show up in the section in which 7 asks where I want to install.
Motherboard is GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard, hard drive is Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive.
The hard drive is plugged into the top SATA port (It has like, 10).
I'm doing a clean install on my computer, and it's going alright until it asks me to choose which hard drive I want to install Windows 7 on. Apparently I have 2: a C drive and a D(Recovery) drive.What should I do in this situation? Should I just install on the C drive, or should I do what it says here: Partition the Hard Drive in a Windows 7 Install and delete the partitions and create a new one.
i was wondering if anyone has any programs they could recommend to use to wipe a hard drive clean before reinstalling windows 7, I noticed you have this CCleaner 3 link on here CCleaner - Download.com If i put that on a disk and started it up as i would to reinstall can that wipe the disk clean?
I have download windows 7, backed up all my drivers and copied all my important info onto my external Hard drive and am about to try and clean install windows 7.
But do i have to partition the hard drive? My Dell laptop has a 110GB hard drive which came already partitioned. 10GB is called 'Recovery', do i need to do the same and make a larger partition and install Windows 7 or just leave it as it is?
Is there a way I can remove all the partitions from my Hard drive and do a full format (not quick)? The windows 7 install disc does a quick format but I would like to clean it thoroughly. Is there a utility I can use at boot time to do this?
Hard drive is full but not really. I think it is a virus because I removed a bunch of programs and there is very little in computer and it said I had 9GB available the next day went to 180KB free out of 296GB. I can't even take pictures off to wipe out and start over.
I bought an HP desktop about 2 years ago with vista 64 bit on it and it has been crappy ever since. I've had problems with programs not being recognized, things not installing at all when they should, and it freezing up for no good reason. Anyway, I went out and bought Windows 7 ultimate the full version. I saved the few files I have on a jump drive and I want to completely wipe out the hard drive and install windows 7 and start from scratch.
I have a PC on which the hard drive died. I had previously done the Advisor and it said everything is OK for new install of Win 7 Home Premium.
I removed old hard drive and 2 gigs of memory (now 2 gigs installed) installed new hard drive, set appropriate ( i think) BIOS parms. When I start the DVD I get the 'loading files' message and the colorful logo then a blank screen with a large arrrow cursor -- and nothing. Wait 5, 10 15 minutes and the only hint of activity is the hard drive light is flickering about once every 2 seconds. I've now waited for over an hour and still nothing else.
I've tried to do all the things that have been suggested for others who have had problems but it hasn't helped. Machine is a Dell 4700C with 3.4 GHz processor , 2 gigs of memory, only keyboard, mouse, and monitor attached in addition to the hard drive.
I decided to replace my hard drive because it seemed to have viruses that were making it run incredibly slow. I put in a brand new hard drive and proceded to run the Windows 7 Ultimate disk. I got as far as the beginning of the actual installation (after telling it what partition to put it on) and it ran for a few minutes and then I got the errror message 0x80070057.
Recently did a clean install of windows 7 on my laptop but when I finished the install, I noticed that there still 158 gb used space on my hardddrive. Is this normal? I thought I had reformatted the entire system as i don't have aceess to any of my pre-existing files...
Before I start this happened after updating the motherboard BIOS from version 1.4 to 1.7, I went to 1.6 after just in case the latest BIOS had a bug
I've been stuck on the startup repair for almost 5 hours saying that it's repairing my hard drive or whatever (i forget exactly what it said), I first booted linux to check the SMART data on the HDD (i now know that I can do it with HBCD too) it came back all fine. I am now running Hirens Boot CD and DRevitalise to scan and repair bad sectors.
I purchased an Inspiron 15R today and wanted to do a clean install of Windows 7 right out of the box. I'm using a Windows 7 disk from another machine.I formatted the drive and all of it's partitions (recovery etc.) and installed the OS. After booting though I get sent to an error screen that tells me Windows had an error starting up and that I should choose a way to startup with the usual safe mode etc. No matter what I choose it sends me to this screen. So I booted from the disk again to attempt to format and reinstall, but now I have no disk drives to install to.
I have run a diagnostics check and nothing seems to be wrong, the HDD is still being recognized in the BIOS. What can I do to get my HDD back and showing up in the install destination options?
What do I do now? I decided to replace my existing hard drive as I thought it was damaged due to viruses. I installed a new hard and then used my Windows 7 Ultimate DVD to install. I got as far as the above. If this question has been answered somewhere else on this site
I deleted the post because i realized thaT I had an older post here that came close to the same subject and no one replied - so i have no reason to believe anyone would reply to this one.
Alright, so after a few days of hardware checking I've determined that the cause of my computer being as messed up as it is is the hard drive.
Seagate's own SeaTools says it failed the drive tests, and I'm gonna have to call them later and get an RMA on it.
Well, how would I go about installing Windows 7 on my replacement hard drive? I've installed and activated it a few times on this same drive, but I think that's because the activation system detects the exact same hardware, therefore it lets me keep activating it.
If I put in a different hard drive, though, won't it see it as a different computer and deny me the chance to activate it? (Same goes with my OEM Student version of Office 2007)
So what would you guys suggest? Can I de-activate it from one computer then activate it on another? or what?
I have installed a few drives in my time. But something I do not understand has happened in drive manager in Win 7.Obviously I have to initialise a new drive before I can format and partition it, but when I go to initialise another box comes up and identifies the new drive and asks to I want to partition it with MFT tables?? Not seen that before I obviously dont want to move any boot partitions from my C drive.I have drive C with hidden boot partition, main active system partition and a data partition (logical).The new drive will be E, is 1TB and I want to partition into 4 logical drives. I know how to do it, query is what is the box that comes up and asks whether I want MFT or another version?? Is it safe to say OK.
I have pre-purchased a Windows 7 professional upgrade and am trying to determine my install options when it is available.
I am currently running Windows Xp pro and have a computer with 2 identical hard drives. I know I will have to do a clean install from Xp. I would like to install Windows 7 on the second hard drive and be able to use both Windows 7 and Xp until I am familiar enough with Windows 7 to confidently abandon Xp.
I have a hard drive switch that I will use to boot to the OS that I want to use. I elected to do this instead of using dual boot. Currently that switch is not installed.
I would like to install Windows 7 on the second hard drive, but am concerned that I will need to verify that I have an authentic copy of Xp for that to work.
Will there be options during the install so that I can select the second drive as the place to install Windows 7 (and make it a bootable drive)? I would not like to get into a situation where I would be overwriting Windows Xp on the drive I currently boot from.
So I been trying to follow this guide, but it hasn't been working. I set the computer to boot from usb and then it will just sit there. I tried with an empty flash drive and it would say no bootable table or something similar, so it does detect my hard drive having something bootable and fails.
So far, despite following the directions, when I try to boot from the external hard drive it just hangs there and the screen never opens (unless I need to really wait a really long time).
It seems the missing detail is likely that I have to make the hard drive bootable.
However, so far, all the guides that talks about making them bootable requires to clean the drive (well flash, but I guess hard drives requires that too). That defeats one of the biggest selling points in this guide, no need to delete any files (also to note, I seperated the hard drive into two partitions as directed, the cmd only see them as one). So how does one make it bootable without clearing all the files.
Update: How to make your external HD bootable It seems that it should work for that person, I don't understand what is my problem. When I try to boot from USB, it just hangs there and the Windows7 setup never appears.
Another thing to note that this laptop is a dell 1520 which is powerful enough for the 64-bit, though currently I think it is on 32-bit vista.
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T410. Win7 came pre-installed on hard drive without DVD copies. I want to put in a new solid state hard drive. Is there a way to create a Windows installation disc so I can format and install Win7 on the new hard drive? I know there's a copy of Win7 on a partition on the hard drive but I don't know what to do to make a DVD.
I have Windows 7 originally installed on an old HDD and recently purchased an SSD.How do I go about installing windows 7 into the SSD and deleting it from the old HDD?Is a reformat of the HDD the only way?
In my 8 years of serious computing, I have never had to replace a HDD but I am going to have to do it for the first time sometime earlier next week when the new one along with the recovery media from Acer gets here.I have managed to locate a service manual for my Acer Notebook model series here.The new HDD is a WD500BPKT @ 7200RPM The old HDD is a WD3200BEVT-22ZCT0 @ 5400RPM Will I need to install new drivers (SCSI etc.) or anything else, or is it a simple plug-and-play operation once the recovery media is booted off of the disks and installed?I suspect I will need to change the BIOS Boot Order so that the opticle drive is first rather than IDE 0 to get the disks to come up, so that's a non-issue.
So I am building my first computer so i bought my new motherboard, processor,etc.. and windows 7, but i am using an old hard drive from my broken computer that has windows xp on it. Before it all gets to my house i was curious on how to wipe the hard drive and install windows 7.