Getting ready for clean OS reinstall, need advice on partitions...

[earwicker7]

As the title says, I'm getting ready to do a clean reinstall of Windows 7. I've optimized my BIOS as much as possible (no overclocking yet, although there probably will be soon) and have backed up all the important information. I've never dealt with partitions before, so I need some advice. I went into the Computer Management part of the Control Panel, and here is what I currently have (it's a RAID setup, if that helps); there are three partitions on what it says is a 931.52 GB hard drive:

39 MB Healthy (OEM Partition)

RECOVERY 8.51 GB NTFS Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)

(C 922.96 GB NTFS Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

So, should I keep things this way, or are there better ways to have it set up? I'm pretty good about backing up my files to a flash drive, so I don't really see the need for a Recovery partition... is this unwise?

 

[Trotter]

Unless you are going to reinstall the original OEM setup there is no need for a recovery partition. If you are going to go with Win7 from something else (XP, Vista), I would format the whole thing and create a single new partition.

Use GParted to do the removal and formatting.

 

[earwicker7]

So I do all the changes before the reinstall? I tried to get rid of the Recovery partition in the control panel and it wouldn't let me..

 

[Trotter]

GParted will be able to remove the partitions. It boots from a disk so it doesn't touch the hard drive at all and can do whatever you need. Just make sure to format it using NTFS as that is what Windows uses.

 

[earwicker7]

Cool... I used it, and boy does it seem thorough... you should put a "Could take 8 hours!" warning on there lol. Now I just need to figure out how to alter the strip size (no BIOS options, and my understanding is that 128kb is a bit big for a gamer).

 

[earwicker7]

Oh, one other thing... the blocks were set by default to (if I remember correctly) 4MB; I never really considered whether this was optimal for gaming.