Windows 7

Ok i have Windows Vista Home Premium

and just got the new windows 7 professional

but since i dont have vista business i cant just upgrade i have to do a clean install.

but i dont want to transfer all of my files to a new partition and stuff it takes too long…

does anyone have any suggestions as to what i should?

dual boot then transfer all the files?

Creating a new partition isn't that time consuming, but if you ara absolutely against it you can try removable storage, or burn it to disks.

I think dual boot is a bad idea because win7 gets used to only having half the drive space available, so when you empty the other partition win7 is still confined to that original partition. You would be able to use the other partition as extra space, I believe, but im not aware of any way to safely mend to partitions into one without data loss.

edit: also consider the obvious options such as moving it to another system temporarily, in case you didn't think of that.

If you do the dual boot, mending the partition is the easy part. If you already have the space and the partition, you are good. If you are splitting the drive fresh I would be wary. There are a lot of tools on the web that can do this for you, however, the way windows installs it sanctions a portion of the drive as "unmoveable" which shows up in green when you do a defragmentation. This section CANNOT be moved. if it is in the middle of your drive that really sucks as your partition will be split on the drive (not shown in Windows though). Bringing the old files takes the same software as splitting it. It will take all the files and put them into a folder and drop them into the other partition(just hope you have enough room ;)) then it will merge them. a simple google search will get you your partition answers.

AldarHawk wrote: If you do the dual boot, mending the partition is the easy part. If you already have the space and the partition, you are good. If you are splitting the drive fresh I would be wary. There are a lot of tools on the web that can do this for you, however, the way windows installs it sanctions a portion of the drive as "unmoveable" which shows up in green when you do a defragmentation. This section CANNOT be moved. if it is in the middle of your drive that really sucks as your partition will be split on the drive (not shown in Windows though). Bringing the old files takes the same software as splitting it. It will take all the files and put them into a folder and drop them into the other partition(just hope you have enough room ;)) then it will merge them. a simple google search will get you your partition answers.

Ah, my bad, I wasn't aware you could merge windows partitions. I'm more of a linux expert, lol.

Active@ partition manager is about the best thing going to create and reassign partitions.

1st. How big is your drive? 2nd. How much free space is their?

When I install a new OS, I usually put all the files I want to keep on an external harddrive. Then when I install the OS I unplug it so I can't accidentally fuck things up. After installing, just copy the files back. Of course, this requires an extra harddrive.

You can easily back-up all your files to dvd also, You don't need an extra drive.

korg wrote: You can easily back-up all your files to dvd also, You don't need an extra drive.

Depends, I usually like to save music, which can be 80-150gig, which while possible to get on several dvds, is far too annoying.

The best solution I have found is to use an external hard drive, that I keep a backup of all my data.

80-150gig of music, WTF! I was talking about normal people backing up on dvd. I was just stating that dvd's are an alternative if you don't have the glue for an external.

You could also go purchase a new harddrive for your box and install Windows 7 on that. Then you can connect the old harddrive and either mount it or p2v (physical to virtual) it. In the latter of those two, you'll actually be able to run the old operating system as tho it was a virtual machine, giving you access to not just the files but the applications also.