Installing fresh windows 7 on partitioned hard drive

[yang]

Hi guys, I'm pretty noobish regarding fresh OS installs on partitioned hard drive so I was wondering if you could clear something up for me. Basically, I was wondering if I could keep all my files from other partitions on the hard drive if I do a fresh install of windows 7 on the partition I've designated for my OS. The reason I'm asking this is because I don't want to waste time backing up 1.5TB of storage content if I could just leave it on my hard drive during the fresh install. Thank you so much for the help in advance.

 

[Herr_Koos]

No problem there, I've done exactly the same thing. To give you a bit of background: I have XP 32bit running and wanted to try out the Win 7 RC, obviously without deleting any of my normal stuff since this would be a trial run only.

I used a brilliant (and free) partitioning app called GParted to create a separate 20GB partition out of the free space on my drive. I then installed Win 7 RC x64 onto this partition, and voila! Dual-boot XP and 7. I can play with 7 to my heart's content and still use XP as my primary OS.

No need to delete anything, although it's always a good idea to make backups in case something goes catastrophically wrong with the partitioning.

 

[lemonade4]

I assume the hard drive would need to be defragmented prior to partitioning it?

 

[yang]

thanks a lot for the help guys