Vista HD needed question

[F. McSimmons]

Vista requires 15gigs of HD in order to run properly (at least thats in the requirements.)

My silly question is if this HD has to be on a certain drive? I apparently have 2 drives and one is completely empty but the other is about 15gb free. This is fine right?

[SirFelixCat]

As a default, the OS (Vista, in this case) is loaded on the C: partition.

I'm guessing your secondary drive (either D: E: F: or G is the empty one and the C: is the one that has data on it.

You do realize that if you're running XP now, this will replace it, right? Therefore, it's going to overwrite your entire drive. So back up everything you want to keep and then do a clean install.


Or swap the hard drives (physically swap them inside your computer) and then you can install Vista on the unused drive and keep all your data on the other one. But keep in mind that the OS that you're running currently will still be on the other drive and just wasting space.

Hope that's clear....

[F. McSimmons]

No no Felix, I am running Vista already and am just worried about having enough HD for it to run. Vista is installed on C and D is empty.

What I was wondering was if the 15gigs needed to run Vista can come from the D drive of whether it must be from the drive vista is installed on.

[SirFelixCat]

[ QUOTE ]
No no Felix, I am running Vista already and am just worried about having enough HD for it to run. Vista is installed on C and D is empty.

What I was wondering was if the 15gigs needed to run Vista can come from the D drive of whether it must be from the drive vista is installed on.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ahhhh gotcha. My bad.

Well, you should be fine, but keep in mind that as you get closer and closer to filling a HDD, your computers performance WILL suffer.

How big is your C: drive, total? And you 'should' be fine, but I'd look to start using your D: and keeping some spare room on your C:.

[F. McSimmons]

C drive is 35gigs in total size w/ 16gigs free space.

[SirFelixCat]

[ QUOTE ]
C drive is 35gigs in total size w/ 16gigs free space.

[/ QUOTE ]

You're plenty fine. But still, start using that secondary drive for some stuff.


FWIW, on my new desktop, I'm going to install Vista on one partion on my "main" HDD, then use the rest of that hard drive, on another partition, for my drivers and programs.

This has the advantage for when/if you want to do a clean install of your OS, you can just do it on that partition w/o reformating your entire HDD and not having to go searching for drivers and reinstalling programs. Makes it quite painless that way.

HTH.

[F. McSimmons]

cool. Thanks.

[Meech]

[ QUOTE ]
FWIW, on my new desktop, I'm going to install Vista on one partion on my "main" HDD, then use the rest of that hard drive, on another partition, for my drivers and programs.

This has the advantage for when/if you want to do a clean install of your OS, you can just do it on that partition w/o reformating your entire HDD and not having to go searching for drivers and reinstalling programs. Makes it quite painless that way.

HTH.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good luck with all that. Sounds good on paper, in practice it just doesn't work that way.

[SirFelixCat]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
FWIW, on my new desktop, I'm going to install Vista on one partion on my "main" HDD, then use the rest of that hard drive, on another partition, for my drivers and programs.

This has the advantage for when/if you want to do a clean install of your OS, you can just do it on that partition w/o reformating your entire HDD and not having to go searching for drivers and reinstalling programs. Makes it quite painless that way.

HTH.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good luck with all that. Sounds good on paper, in practice it just doesn't work that way.

[/ QUOTE ]

Um, it works just fine on my other computer. I'm curious as to why you say that.

[Beavis68]

you will still have to reinstall the programs and drivers because you reg entries get deleted when you reformat, but it will save your data.