Help on clean instal for windows 7 regarding second hard drive

[Shrimp_Guard]

I am planning on doing a clean install for windows 7 on my ssd to try and speed things up a bit before i put my new graphics card in. I have never done this before so i don't know what to expect, i have looked at online guides but they do not give any info regarding 2 drives (SSD and a hard drive). For example i have a bunch of files from steam on my hard drive like i do with many programs. Will i need to wipe my hard drive as well? If not will i have to do anything once steam is reinstalled to get it to recognise the files on the Hard drive.
Any other help/tips on a clean install would be helpful as again this is the first time i have done it and i am quite worried about loosing data/having to spend ages redownloading/ installing.

 

[Math Geek]

a lot of programs will have to be reinstalled since you will lose the registry and other important info that tells the pc where the programs are at. the steam games can be reused but i'd have to look up how to do that again since i have never done it myself. but most other programs will have to be reinstalled to the hdd again once windows is running again.

to do this, disconnect the hdd and leave only the ssd hooked up. this way there is no way the installer can screw up and put windows in the wrong place. install windows like normal to your ssd and once it is up and running with the drivers and such, then turn it off and hook the hdd back up again. all your stuff is still there and you can begin getting the games back into steam and reinstalling the other stuff that needs to be.

win 7 is not very good about installing wifi/ethernet drivers out of the box. so it is a good idea to have those already handy so it can get online as soon as possible. windows update will usually handle the rest once your online. it's also possible depending on how old your win 7 disk is that you'll run into the normal update issues they introduced to try and get you to move to win 10. if yu find windows update won't work and just sits at "searching for updates" forever. take a look here for a solution that works most of the time. http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3062210/windows-update-roll-released.html