Vista Installation with several HDD installed

[Jeff]

Question for the experts,


Can Vista be installed on a new drive while several other drives are already
connected or does the install drive have to be alone during install?

I thought that a prompt might come up during Vista install that gave you a
choice of where to install the OS and one would choose the HD they recognize
or the one that is empty?

So, does the install drive have to be alone then all the HDD reconnected
afterwards?

TIA,

jeff

 

[Arno Wagner]

Question for the experts,

Can Vista be installed on a new drive while several other drives are
already connected or does the install drive have to be alone during
install?

UNless MS screwed up colossaly (not beyond them) this should
not be an issue. It may be that you still need to install
on the boot-drive, but I think they finally have fixed that.

I thought that a prompt might come up during Vista install that gave
you a choice of where to install the OS and one would choose the HD
they recognize or the one that is empty?

So, does the install drive have to be alone then all the HDD
reconnected afterwards?

Sould not be so. Why not try it? If you are afraid Vista mught
mess up your other drives, you can still disconnect them.
But honestly, you should stay with XP anyways, Vista is a pice
of trash.

Arno

 

[Nik Simpson]

UNless MS screwed up colossaly

They didn't.

(not beyond them) this should not be an issue.

It isn't.

 

[DRT]

Question for the experts,


Can Vista be installed on a new drive while several other drives are already
connected or does the install drive have to be alone during install?

I thought that a prompt might come up during Vista install that gave you a
choice of where to install the OS and one would choose the HD they recognize
or the one that is empty?

So, does the install drive have to be alone then all the HDD reconnected
afterwards?

TIA,

jeff

Vista will install even with other drives installed. But I have
made it a policy not to install an OS on a computer with other
drives plugged in and active on the system. When I'm installing XP
or Vista, I always unplug the other drives and leave only the target
drive during installation. Here are some reasons:

(1) No matter what your experience level, you could still
accidentally format a data drive when the installation program
reaches the point for you to choose the drive and partition to
install to. But this blunder is impossible if the other data drives
are not plugged into the system. There will be only one drive to
choose from in the list of drives to format/repartition.

(2) Sometimes Windows Vista and XP will install itself to weird
drive letter such as F:, E:, G:, etc. It is very hard to change the
drive letter back to the conventional C: drive after the OS has
started and is active. Compounding it is some applications my hard
code the path to system folders like Windows, Program Files and
System and you'd need to change all those as well.

So, during OS installation, connecting only the target drive you
want to install the new OS to will completely eliminate the problems
described above. After you have successfully installed Windows,
simply shutdown the system normally, reattach all other drive power
cables and restart the computer. Windows will pick up the other
drives but you can be assured your system drive partition will be C:
and you can use the computer management utility to assign the
previous drive letters back to your old drives/partitions to make
them exactly as your old OS was setup.


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