Vista Installation on RAID drives

[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?

[Illuminati]

Yes. it will format the drives and then install the os from scratch... all data currently on the drive would be gone.

[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

[Illuminati]

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.

[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.