I'm planning a new build soon and I had some quick questions about hard drives. My current computer has an 80GB HD and a 750GB HD both formatted in NTFS. The smaller drive is currently the boot drive and the 750 one houses games and movies. To save money in my new build I am planning on keeping the two hard drives. My question is if I were to keep the same setup, smaller drive as the boot drive and the 750 as storage would there be any way to keep the files on the larger drive so I could get my new OS(Windows 7 64-bit) to recognize them? Many of the files are games downloaded through D2D or EADM which have limits on how many times I can download them. Thanks for the help.
It depends. If the games on the larger drive are installed games, and not freestanding, self contained executables, then no, as they would have to be installed again on your new system for registry entries and system folders to be created etc.
Off the top of my head I think you can do that, but you'll need a program like Partition Magic that can insert partitions on a partially used drive. If you've never done partitioning before, it's a process that establishes a permanent (until you remove it) split or splits in the way the hdd presents itself, effectively making it function as 2 (or however many partitions you make plus one) drives. With a new partition on the drive (with it's own drive letter) that is big enough for the Win7 install (don't how big you need though, haven't got as far as Win7 yet) it should simply be a case selecting the new partition as the target for the windows installation. Once the installation is complete you can go into your BIOS and set the order of drives from which you want the computer to attempt booting from, or you can leave it as a multi-OS startup procedure which allows you to select which OS you want to boot from each time you turn the pc on (which gets tedious very quickly cos you always forget it's set like that and the thing sits there giving you 30 seconds to choose, which if you've left the room to give it time to boot up becomes frustrating quickly). Edit: Didn't fully take in the bit about games, so Pookeyhead is right on that count, but it sounds like they would be the sort of games that aren't installed and integrated into the OS, so it shouldn't be a problem unless they were.
Okay so my plan so far is this, create a new partition on the 750 drive and move the game installers/movies to this partition, then wipe the 80gb HD and install Windows 7. Then once inside Windows 7 format the remainder of the 750 drive and reinstall games. Does that sound like that would work? Any considerations as to disk format? I'm not sure what format Windows 7 uses.
I'm confused now, the OP is asking if the 750gb will be recognized by win7 without a reformat (data preservation) right? since the 80gb is the boot drive, why does he need to partition the 750gb drive at all? o.o
That was partially my first question. If the 80gb is the boot drive will Windows 7 recognize the files on the 750gb drive? I'm mostly worried that it will just keep prompting me to format it if they use different formats.
win7 and XP both run on NTFS, so there SHOULDN'T be a problem... I'm running the exact same upgrade route as you pretty soon (I also have a copy of win7 sitting beside me, except that I continue to need the computer for now and thus no time to install it). http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/1249-63-ntfs-win7-windows posts # 4 and 5 clarify that it should be working in terms of usage (note that they're talking about a dual boot system though) as they're both NTFS systems. If it doesn't work, it'll just involve re-installing XP to the boot drive, and possibly investing in an external HD...
Because he has INSTALLED programs on the 750GB drive, and when he builds his new machine and re-installs his OS on the small drive, the INSTALLED applications on the large drive will no longer work. I think his concern is he has limited downloads available to re-download his games, and wanted to just plug his large drive in after re-installing, and have everything work as normal. He can only do this if the games are not installed via the OS, but are stand-alone executables.
