Watch Drive Selection Carefully When Choosing Installation Drive
I just installed Windows 7 RTM. On the PC I was installing, I had 5 hard drives, three logical drives; three were combined into a spanned drive. In the BIOS, they were listed (simplified) as: 1. 320GB drive (system) 2. 500GB (part 1 of span) 3. 500 GB 4. 500GB (part 2 of span) 5 500GB (part 3 of span) Obviously the bios didn't know the function of the drive, I added the part in parenthesis. Windows Vista disk manager listed the drives in the same order.
The most important thing here is that the 320 GB system drive is listed first and the 500 GB single drive is listed third both in Vista and in the BIOS. When I was selecting the install drive in the Windows 7 install, I didn't pay enough attention. I selected the top drive in the list and formatted it. This should have been the 320 GB system drive.
Instead, Windows 7 had swapped the 1st and 3rd drives in the list so I wiped out the 500 GB stand alone drive! Luckily for me, the only thing on that drive were about half-a-dozen VMWare virtual machines and I had backed them all up reasonably recently so nothing critical was lost. There were some working copies of some various other little files that weren't backed up but nothing important. So, take head. Pay close attention to the Windows 7 install drive selection.
View Replies (Posted: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 12:16 AM)
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