Questions about installing Vista on a new HDD

Hi all,

Just ordered a new Hitachi 7200rpm 200gb hard drive to replace the stocker in my F3jp. Along with it I ordered a USB 2.0 external housing to hopefully make the transition easier. What would be the easiest way for me to end up with a clean install of Vista on the new HDD? Can I just install the drive in my notebook, boot with the Asus recovery DVD in the drive, and go from there? Or do I need to copy the old image from my stock hard drive over before I can use the recovery DVD? I searched a bunc of threads, but they all seemed to talk about replacing the HDD or doing a clean Vista install, but not both. Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.

 

I suggest partitioning the drive the way you like it, with some 3rd party utility; for instance, BootIt Next Generation, or a FreeDOS CD with FDISK. Check my WinXP guide for how to obtain bootable disks of either of these two things.

Then insert the recovery DVD, boot from it, and let it do its thing: make sure you choose to install on 1st partition only otherwise the entire partition table will be overwritten. When it asks you to insert the drivers CD, don't do it; just force a reboot. That will give you a clean installation, and then you can install drivers manually and only install those utilities that you want. No bloatware.

The only thing is that if you want to keep your recovery partition on the new HDD, (such that you can recover windows from the HDD with the new HDD as well -- works faster, but you get all the bloatware) you'll need to use some partition imaging/cloning tool to copy this partition.

 

Do I need to make more than one partition, or is that optional? Am I going to have any problems with .ini files starting from scratch with a SATA drive? Thanks for the help so far.

 

So I can put a new hard drive in there, boot from the recovery disk, and Vista will install without any problems?

 

Yes

And all the drivers should be on the DVD

 

The drivers are not on the recovery DVD. They are on the drivers CD. The OP should not insert the drivers CD when requested, if he wants a clean Vista install.

W.r.t. the OPs second post: I strongly recommend making more than one partition. At the least, one system partition (Windows files, Program Files) and one data partition. Much headaches can be saved in case of an OS crash.

 

Well the hard drive replacement went well. No problems and now I'm up and running with all the utilities and apps I want. I made a 135 GB partition for windows and the remailing 50 GB for data. The only problem with making a data partition in Vista is that you need to mess around with the registry for a while so that all your programs look to D:\ for what was your C:\Users folder.

As a side note, replacing the stock 5400 RPM drive with the 7200 RPM drive bumped the Windows Experience Index score for hard drive data transfer up 0.6 to 5.4

 

"he only problem with making a data partition in Vista is that you need to mess around with the registry for a while so that all your programs look to D:\ for what was your C:\Users folder."

Yep but at least now if you need to reinstall the OS you might even keep the application settings (assuming the new install will recognize them..)

Anyway you can safely store stuff in my documents my pictures etc.

 

Oh really? I can't put driver CD into laptop when small window box on screen ask to insert the driver CD?

 

No, you can if you want to. To get the computer back to the exact same way it came from Asus, you want to put the driver disk in at the end. You do a hard reboot without putting the driver disk in to obtain a "clean" install of Windows Vista, comparable to what you'd get with a retail box.

 

Yes that's what I meant. But if you don't care for a clean install a much faster solution is recovery from HDD -- F9 at boot. In 15-20 mins at most you're done.