windows xp upgrade to windows 7 issues

supremeone77

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Mar 22, 2011
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I have windows xp 32 bit and I want to upgrade to windows 7 but I have an issue. One is my hard drive partition letters are all messed up. It looks like this:

C: 600 gig partition, no OS
D: 100 gig partition, no OS
E: 35 gig partition, windows xp

I want to the swap the E drive with the C drive, so my system drive is C: and not E:. I have no idea how to do this. I can only think of one solution right now. What if move C: to F:, and right after that install windows 7 as C:? Right now my system stores some files on C: that it needs to boot so couldn't do this while in Windows XP, maybe might need some boot disk but I don't know of any boot disk that would let me change partition letter.

Any ideas? I really want to upgrade but this partition letter thing has always bothered me.
 
Solution
What you need to do is disconnect ALL drives from the system, except the drive you want to install windows 7 on. Begin the windows 7 installation and make sure that when you get to the screen that asks where you want to install windows, you click on the advanced options button, delete ALL the existing partitions on the drive and then install to the unallocated space without creating any new partitions or formatting anything. Windows will do this automatically during the install. Follow these instructions, with all other drives disconnected, and then reconnect the drives AFTER the installation.

Also, it's a good idea to make sure your primary drive is connected to the SATA or IDE 0 header on the motherboard, or 1 if there is no 0. Then...
What you need to do is disconnect ALL drives from the system, except the drive you want to install windows 7 on. Begin the windows 7 installation and make sure that when you get to the screen that asks where you want to install windows, you click on the advanced options button, delete ALL the existing partitions on the drive and then install to the unallocated space without creating any new partitions or formatting anything. Windows will do this automatically during the install. Follow these instructions, with all other drives disconnected, and then reconnect the drives AFTER the installation.

Also, it's a good idea to make sure your primary drive is connected to the SATA or IDE 0 header on the motherboard, or 1 if there is no 0. Then install. The header number should be indicated on the board itself or you can check your motherboard model user manual to figure out which is the first header (Header means the place where it connects/plugs in on the motherboard.).

Windows 7 CLEAN install:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1649-clean-install-windows-7-a.html


If you follow these steps, the Windows drive will automatically be designated as C:, and other drives will become designated with other letters automatically by the OS. If you ever want to change a drive letter, you can go into administrative tools, drive management and right click on the desired partition and change the letter.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/change-add-remove-drive-letter#1TC=windows-7
 
Solution

supremeone77

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Mar 22, 2011
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Hmmm that is a good solution, the only thing is all 3 partitions (C,D, and E) are on one HD. I don't think i'd have another HD to use unless I bought one.

Is there any solution that I can do with just the current HD I have and moving around partitions?
 
Do you have data saved on the other partitions? If so, you can simply go into disk management, change the drive letter of the current C: partition to another letter and then change the OS partition drive letter to C:. Then you can proceed with the installation by formatting the C: partition only and pointing windows to that partition during the installation.

The better option though would be to get another drive, transfer any necessary files from all your current partitions to that drive, and then do as indicated above to the target drive for the OS by deleting all the partitions on it and installing. Windows 7 uses NTFS file tables while XP generally used FAT32, which may create issues if there are leftover boot partitions from the old installations.