Crucial M4 128GB - Reinstalling Windows 7

oobe_banoobe

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A little History, I have the Crucial M4 as my boot drive and two Hitachi 1.5 TB HDD for storage. When installing windows 7 for the first time a couple weeks ago, I didn't know to disconnect the storage drives and as a result as I found out recently, the System Reserved landed on the Hitachi instead of the SSD. I am early on in setting up my computer so reinstalling Windows seems like the easiest way to quickly clean things up and switch over the system reserved partition back to the SSD.

My question is how the M4 would act in reinstalling Windows. I have heard about some SSD's losing performance when reformatting or deleting what is currently on the drive when attempting to reinstall Windows. I found a thread about reinstalling windows because of the same issue I have:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/5713-63-windows-sata-sata-hard-drive-problem-help

I'm guessing step 4 is deleting what is on the SSD and then reinstalling windows using the Windows CD/DVD.

I was also unsure about (re)formatting the Hitachi HDD that currently has the 100mb partition as I have looked at the partition in Disk Management with the current state of things and the option to format the drive is greyed out. Will this become available when I reinstall Windows with the OS and System Reserved both on the SSD?

Thanks for the help!
 
Solution


Don’t worry about losing performance. TRIM and idle Garbage Collection will restore performance.

When you do a clean installation of Windows, Windows will ask you where you want to install the software. Just select the partition that contains your 1st installation. You will get a prompt telling you all data will be deleted on the partition. Just select ok and next. Windows will delete the partition, create a new partition, format the drive, and install the software.

Before installation, make sure the port your SSD is...


Don’t worry about losing performance. TRIM and idle Garbage Collection will restore performance.

When you do a clean installation of Windows, Windows will ask you where you want to install the software. Just select the partition that contains your 1st installation. You will get a prompt telling you all data will be deleted on the partition. Just select ok and next. Windows will delete the partition, create a new partition, format the drive, and install the software.

Before installation, make sure the port your SSD is connected to is in AHCI mode for maximum performance.



I’m not positive, but I think if you right-click on the box that has the disk number and take the drive offline, you then might have the option to delete both partitions and reformat the drive.



 
Solution

oobe_banoobe

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Thanks for all the help, I will let others know what I did in case anyone else new has the same question. I have since reinstalled windows with disconnecting the secondary hard drives which put the system reserved on the ssd along with the OS. I reconnected the drives and went into disc management and was able to easily delete the old system reserved on the secondary drive and all was resolved.

Thanks again!