Hello everyone. I apologize in advance for this long post but there is no other way to explain my situation. My pc came with Vista Home Premium 32 bit pre-installed when I bought it last year. The hard drive had two partitions C & D - one for the OS and one for recovery. After experimenting with dual-boots and additional OSes I ended up with four partitions. (I will return to the partitions issues below...) When Windows 7 became available I purchased the Student Upgrade (download) and upgraded successfully. Performed custom installation and replaced Vista with 7. I know the procedure required to perform clean installs with the upgrade media and here's my two questions: 1. Will I be able to use the same product key for the second time on the same computer? 2. How can I erase all data from my four partitions AND merge them in one single partition? (I know that I'm probably missing something but I've been googling for days and haven't found a clear answer about the partitions). Thanks for any replies
if you delete all partition while installing Windows 7, just use one of those and then once installed use Partition Wizard to merge all of them together, and yes you can use the same Product Key as many time as you like, just know that you will have to use Phone Activation next time you reinstall windows
You should create a large data partition, create a Users/your user name folder and move all you personal folders - Pictures, Documents etc to it. Then if the worst happens and your OS goes "belly up" at least all your data etc is ready to be accessed easily. Just a thought.
As rosco said is best to have partition n safe urn files on a different partition in case windows crash. I have 3 hhd n trust me is the best idea plus get you hands on acronies to do automatic backup of your system
I've been waiting for Microsoft to implement for years easily being able to en-mass move all or select user's data folders to another partition. Not that it's that hard although now it takes longer since 7 and Vista have many more data folders than XP did. It's just tedious to do it for every Windows installation I do for anyone.