WIN7 & Partition advice needed?

Stinicker

At the moment I have two computers An older Dell and a newer Medion. I have decided to stop using the Medion as a HTPC hooked up to my tv and use it as my main pc making the old Dell redundant.

The Medion has a 500GB hard drive and I have a 1TB Harddrive in the Dell on which I have alot of my data stored. Today I bought a 2TB Hardrive which I plan to fit to the Medion. The plan is to remove the 1TB harddrive from my Dell and fit it to the Medion as the master harddrive and install WIN7 to it, the 2TB harddrive will be the secondary storage for everything else. I have another 1TB external drive and I am moving my stuff from the 1TB internal drive in anticipation of the move and format.

What would be the best way to partition the drive? I was thinking a 200GB "C" drive partition for my documents and photos and day to day files and the remaining 800GB to be partitioned into a "D" drive for everything else. The 2TB drive can remain as just a 2TB G drive.

I may later fit the 500GB from the Medion into the Dell which also has a 250GB drive and reinstall XP back onto it and keep it as a spare.

Finally I am wondering will the change of harddrive upset Windows 7 on the Medion? Would I need another licence?

Lazarus2.0

For the sake of simplicity alone I'd be inclined to keep the 500GB drive as your system drive on the Medion .

Setting anything else as your C drive means installing a fresh copy of Windows . Your licence would still be valid (I assume Win7 was pre-installed) but make sure your product key is still legible on the COA sticker on the case or use MagicalJellybean or similar to obtain it from the HD . While you most likely wont need it it's worth taking a few minutes to be sure you have it just in case .

Do you have recovery CD/DVDs or the facility to make them ? If not then chances are there's a recovery partition on the 500GB HD so you might have a job installing to a new HD either way . There are ways around that (cloning the HD etc) - I've little experience of cloning drives but with the options available to you and the relatively low cost of HDs these days I'd personally choose the path of least resistance and keep the 500 where it is and add other drives as storage .

If you want to shrink your system (C) drive GParted Live can do that without wiping your OS .

Fluffy88

The 200GB partition sounds perfect to me. That will allow for a lot of stuff to go along with your OS.

As for the upsetting of Windows. Yes it will upset it, once you replace the drive in the Medion you will need to do a clean install of windows. As far as the licence goes, the idea is, you own a licence key on the Medion atm. You can replace the drive and do a clean install of Windows to your new drive and use the original licence key with the new install. You own the licence, so once you just use that licence on one machine your not breaking any law. So you should have no problem activating Windows on the newly inserted HDD. If there is an issue, Windows will still install okay, you will just have to use the phone activation to get it activated, just explain your case and all will be good. But you should have no issue activating Windows with the licence key you are using on your Medion.

One point for the installation. When doing the initial installation of Windows only connect the HDD that you want to install Windows on, this will remove any awkwardness you might encounter having two drives. Then once all is running, just plug in the second HDD.

EDIT: Ninja'd

Stinicker

nessyguin wrote: »

For the sake of simplicity alone I'd be inclined to keep the 500GB drive as your system drive on the Medion .

Setting anything else as your C drive means installing a fresh copy of Windows . Your licence would still be valid (I assume Win7 was pre-installed) but make sure your product key is still legible on the COA sticker on the case or use MagicalJellybean or similar to obtain it from the HD . While you most likely wont need it it's worth taking a few minutes to be sure you have it just in case .

Do you have recovery CD/DVDs or the facility to make them ? If not then chances are there's a recovery partition on the 500GB HD so you might have a job installing to a new HD either way . There are ways around that (cloning the HD etc) - I've little experience of cloning drives but with the options available to you and the relatively low cost of HDs these days I'd personally choose the path of least resistance and keep the 500 where it is and add other drives as storage .

If you want to shrink your system (C) drive GParted Live can do that without wiping your OS .

Fluffy88 wrote: »

The 200GB partition sounds perfect to me. That will allow for a lot of stuff to go along with your OS.

As for the upsetting of Windows. Yes it will upset it, once you replace the drive in the Medion you will need to do a clean install of windows. As far as the licence goes, the idea is, you own a licence key on the Medion atm. You can replace the drive and do a clean install of Windows to your new drive and use the original licence key with the new install. You own the licence, so once you just use that licence on one machine your not breaking any law. So you should have no problem activating Windows on the newly inserted HDD. If there is an issue, Windows will still install okay, you will just have to use the phone activation to get it activated, just explain your case and all will be good. But you should have no issue activating Windows with the licence key you are using on your Medion.

One point for the installation. When doing the initial installation of Windows only connect the HDD that you want to install Windows on, this will remove any awkwardness you might encounter having two drives. Then once all is running, just plug in the second HDD.

EDIT: Ninja'd

Super job guys, I have the WIN7 disk as when I bought the desktop it was actually Vista on it with a free upgrade to WIN7 when it launched so I paid the €20 online and Medion posted me out the disk and I cleaned off the system, formatting the Partition and installing WIN Seven, there is also a recovery partition with all the drivers on it for installing Vista and making the Medion like it came fresh out of the box if I wanted to also.

I have the licence key for seven which came from Medion and the sticker on the chassis is actually for Vista.

I will proceed with my plan tomorrow and update the board with how it goes.