Dudes, I'm getting a Dell, and I need to de-crapify it. This is complicated by the fact that I bought an SSD separately that I am going to install in it. So, I figure to blow everything away and do a clean install of Windows. So, first things first, since they don't give you media anymore where can I download Windows (legit) from? I got Windows 8 Pro and might actually want to use the downgrade right to Windows 7 pro, so being able to get either one would be helpful. Going to Microsoft doesn't seem to yield any ISO links (or I'm doing it wrong). Second, during this fresh install I want the SSD to be my C: drive, and I figure I want the OS and apps on that. The HD should be OK as the D: drive for the user directories and all that. Since they don't give media and put a rescue partition on the HD I kinda want to blow that away, too. How do I configure windows to do this? I'm probably going to have 2 user profiles, myself with admin privileges and my wife as a normal account. I'm considering making an image backup (using Macrium reflect) snapshot of it all before even fiddling, just in case. Any other tips or suggestions to get all this coming out rosy?
I am interested in any replies you get to this, because I'm also considering getting a new SSD to use as my main windows + program files drive. My old main drive is split into partitions, and I don't really know anything about how to go about departitioning that. I don't think I've actually reformatted a hard drive myself since the DOS days.
I'm doing the same thing in a few weeks- buy and install a new SSD into the Dell to use as an OS drive and keep the original HD as a data drive. The advice I was given is to pester Dell into sending you the OS disk and perform a clean install onto the SSD from that. There are reports of mixed success in creating recovery disks from the original HD and using them to install onto the SSD, but I wouldn't trust it. Let me know if you find a better way, I'd like to do this as cleanly as possible.
I presume these work: http://www.w7forums.com/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-image-downloads-t12325.html or this : http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool I don't have a dell, but in the bios somewhere there should be an option to change the boot order of your hard drives.
When I was having some issues with my windows install earlier this year I contacted MS and they promised to send me full copy of Windows since I was already a registered owner. They never did actually send it to me, but in theory it sounds like they are willing to when you didn't get one with your PC.
I can get you legit ISOs of any retail variant of Windows you might need, straight from MSDN, though you'd have to provide the keys yourself. That being said, I'm pretty sure OEM keys don't work with retail ISOs, so I don't know how useful it would be for your purposes. If you think this might help, though, hit me up in PM and we can work something out.
This is what MS' website says about the matter. I don't see anything in there differentiating between OEM and retail. In fact, it seems like its for the retail end user, but doesn't say how they're suppose to get the media. A bit of a chicken egg problem. Thanks for the offer, I will reach out via PM if I'd like to take you up on it.
Well, I guess no one really did this before so I'll be going to google and documenting it here. Might be of use to some people. First this is that I learned Windows doesn't really like you installing /usr on different partitions. You'd think this would be easier to do in 2012. I found this article on how to do it in Windows 7. It seemed best for fresh installs and what is good about it did not rely on registry editing or dummy accounts. There is a big of command line chicanery, though, which may put people off. That said I'm leaning mostly towards Windows 8 for various reasons. One is because of this article I found. It seems that moving users to a different drive is more built into Windows 8 than 7. Using an answer file is a bit esoteric for a user like myself, but seems 'cleaner' than the hard links method in Windows 7. Plus I get the upgraded innards of Window 8 even though I'm not sold on Metro and losing my start menu (though that discussion is for a different thread). Another reason is that I learned about secure boot and Windows 8. Apparently my license ID is embedded into the BIOS and is read by Windows 8 when doing a fresh install. I don't think there is a sticker anymore on the PC with the license number. I will learn more when I actually get it (tomorrow).
I got my PC yesterday and went through all my configurations. I think everything is setup nice and clean now, so I will share what I did. I did stick with Windows 8, but since the product key is indeed embedded in the BIOS is was the easiest way for me to do this. My old PC is 7 years old so this was quite a refresh for me. Gone are all these master/slave jumper nonsense settings from IDE drives which made things massivly easier, I think. The mobo only has one SATA 3 port and what I did was unplug the HD from that and plug the SSD into that. On a reboot it didn't panic and booted fine. Neat. Anyway I rebooted to the Windows 8 Pro DVD that I acquired (thanks to BF) and during the install it let me pick the SSD out of a drive/volume/partition list to install to. When I had previously booted to windows I couldn't see it since it wasn't formatted or anything, but MS is smart. At the same time I formatted the HD. I followed the instructions I linked above to install users on my HD and that worked flawlessly. The whole process was pretty smooth and trouble free (and Windows did read the key from the bios and never prompted me for it). The only hiccup was that since the HD was a boot drive the windows boot loader though that it was still bootable so it kept prompting me which drive I wanted to boot. I had to do a google to figure out how to remove that, but it was easy enough. If anyone has and questions, I'll answer as best I can.
I did not go about de-partitioning the HD. I think there was 14 GB 'lost' to the rescue partitions and whatever Dell but on there, but that's about 1% of the whole HD so I wasn't going to sweat it. As for if you want to do all that, I suspect the disk manager interface that comes up during the install would be simple enough to figure out.
Yea, I didn't want to do that and so I didn't. A clean install was pretty straight forward. It was also the fastest windows install I ever did. Of course I can't speak to doing this on windows 7.
