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Vista Installation on RAID drives
Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 2:59 pm
by asa_carter
Hi,
I have a laptop that has XP installed on a RAID drive.
If I install a clean copy of vista, will it overwrite all the existing data on the drives?
Re: Vista Installation on RAID drives
Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 3:10 pm
by Illuminati
Yes. it will format the drives and then install the os from scratch... all data currently on the drive would be gone.
Re: Vista Installation on RAID drives
Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2007 12:55 am
by dkarko
Well i tried that few feeks ago and it kept everything that was on the drive. It asked wether i wanted to format i think, i answered no and it kept everything, plus it moved the old system folders (documents, program files, windows etc) to a folder named WINDOWS.OLD
Re: Vista Installation on RAID drives
Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2007 6:40 am
by Illuminati
dkarko wrote:Well i tried that few feeks ago and it kept everything that was on the drive. It asked wether i wanted to format i think, i answered no and it kept everything, plus it moved the old system folders (documents, program files, windows etc) to a folder named WINDOWS.OLD
That would not be a 'clean' install then. You just did an upgrade.
Re: Vista Installation on RAID drives
Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2007 6:47 am
by dkarko
The partition had Vista. I changed motherboard, it wouldnt boot so i installed without formatting (didn't choose repair either). It warned that there was another installation on this disk and it would be rendered unusable. I didnt choose to format only because i didnt want to mess the bootloaders (the boot.ini was in this partition). Everything non system was left untouched. Rest was backed up to a new folder. The OS was clean, i installed everything from scratch and just deleted the backup folder afterwards.
Anyway, in any case (and in the case of the fellow who posted the question) i believe backing up the data of the drive is the best thing to do, before starting the installation.