Necessity of partitioning a fresh HDD during install of Win7Pro64?

[cortillaen]

I got a new build completely put together and functional after a few issues (quickly resolved courtesy of the great folks here) and am ready to install Win7 Professional 64-bit. One thing I've noticed in several online tutorials and discussions on installing a fresh copy of Win7 is that people always seem to create a new partition on the storage drive (HDD in my case) during the installation, converting the initial partition "Unallocated Space" into Partition 1: System Reserved, and Partition 2, the latter containing almost almost all of the drive space. However, I've also read that the Win7 installation process does something like this automatically. Is there any particular benefit from creating the partition manually during installation or downside to not creating one?

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

I ALWAYS create a new partition in the install process!

 

[cortillaen]

I ALWAYS create a new partition in the install process!

I've got no problem with doing so. I'm just curious as to why. Does it actually make a difference?

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

Yes ,because it would be created when you do the actual clean install

 

[almartin]

Let win 7 create the partition. I would let it have the whole hard drive for the partition it needs. You could always partition it later if you need to add another partition.

 

[cortillaen]

I'm not sure I follow you. I'm talking about the part of the Win7 install process where it asks which drive to install on (11:50 of this video). It looks like the installer will let you continue without creating the partition like Paul does in the video. What I've read suggests skipping Paul's steps there and simply clicking "Next", which would leave the entire disk as-is ("Unallocated Space"), will cause the installer to create a partition automatically. I'm wondering if there is any difference in the results of letting that happen as opposed to doing it the way Paul does in the video.

EDIT: Forgot to link the video, sorry.

Anyway, I decided to see what would happen if I completed the installation without setting partitioning the drive. Turns out the Win7 installer (or at least the Pro 64-bit version) did automatically partition the drive in exactly the same way Paul did in the video (100MB in Partition 1: System Reserved, the rest in Partition 2), even if you skip the process he uses by just clicking "Next". It looks like that step in the process isn't actually needed except for people who want a different partition scheme.