Performing a clean install on my HP dv9700t

I am relatively new to laptops and was wondering if you guys can help me through a clean install of windows vista on my dual hard drive laptop.

I have read through Orev's instructions, and they are very helpful. I am almost about ready to try it out, except i am a little shaky on the deleting and creating new partitions for the hard drive part.

My new HP dv9700t has 2 120GB @7200RPM HDDs and i was wondering how to correctly delete and format my laptop's dual hard drives to work.

any help or suggestions is greatly appreciated

Thanks.

 

Its quite easy..you do it all in the Vista setup screen..

what sort of setup would you like?

I suggest deleting the recovery partition (since its useless)

 

Thanks for the response flipfire.

I dunno what kinda setup i would i want...
i just want to do a clean install on my new HP laptop to get rid of the bloatware.

I've read a bunch of threads that deals with single hard drives and i've seen some people with problems dealing with dual hard drives. I just want to do it correctly and have it work out.

What sort of setup do you recommend?

 

I suggest just having a dual hd setup with no partitions.

Currently your primary drive will have a hidden recovery partition (D on it. This partition will become useless after you do a clean install of Vista because it clears the MBR (master boot record). Make sure you burn the recovery dvd's because its the same thing as the recovery partition.

So when you get to the installation partition screen seen here, you will probably see these 3:

C: (Disk 0, Partition 1 ) <-- First HD
D: (Recovery partition) 7gb
E: (Disk 1) <--- Second HD

1) Format C: and D: (should be quick)..

2) Select C: and click Next. Vista will install on this drive

When Vista and youve installed all the drivers let me know so we can combine the empty 7gb D: recovery partition with the C: drive. Unless you wanna keep use the 7gb partition for storing personal files etc.

 

Thank you so much for the information =)

You're very helpful.

i get what you're saying.

what about the E drive. just let it be?

sorry. i am new at clean installs.

 

I assummed you wanted to use the 1st HD to install the OS and use the 2nd HD for storage space.

No need to touch the E: , it should be empty anyway

 

So what is the second step? going to disk manager and joining the two partitions? Are the current partitions dynamic or do you have to convert? Which is a two way street, you win and you loose. There are some disk utilities that hate dynamic disks.

 

On a laptop you can't use dynamic disks, so you won't be able to join them either. They'll have to live together under two different drive letters, unless you decide to change the drive letter on the second disk and mount it under a folder on the C: instead.

 

Unless you really need all that space, you might think about putting the two hard drives in RAID1. That will transparently mirror them, meaning if one of them dies, you will not lose any data.

 

RAID is not supported on the DV9700t.