Question On Windows 7 Install

Hi Everyone,

I have the Windows 7 Beta, and I put it on my desktop and I love it, and I'd like to go ahead and put it on my netbook. I have a few questions though:

Is there anyway to backup the hidden hard drive portion so I can keep the XP and other restore portions in case I want to go back?
Does anyone know of good software to mount the iso onto the usb drive?

 

I created a live USB of Gparted http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php and used that to shrink my XP partition to 20GB. Once that was done rebooted and formatted the empty space as a new NTFS partition. After that I simply extracted the Win7 iso to a folder on the desktop and ran the installation from there, choosing a custom install to the new partition.

 

I'm confused, I shrink all of it?

 

the recovery partition is about ~4gb, then the rest (~144GB for me) is the pre-instlled XP.

shrink that XP partition to 20gb leaving you with ~124gb empty

reboot into XP and go to disk manager and format the empty space. then you can mount the iso with daemon tools and run the windows 7 instaler from within XP, choosing the new partition (should be the D: drive) as the location of the install. then go grab a coffee

personally i rekon that's the simplest way of installing Win7 onto a netbook without an optical drive. plus you get to keep your XP. The only minor downside is that in Win7 your primary drive letter will be D: not the usual C: but it makes no difference to anything anymore, it's simply an old tradition to install to a C: as you could install to a Z: for all windows would care...

 

Is there anyway to just copy it onto a drive and just have only 7 on there?

 

if you call acer support they will send you the recovery discs at no charge. When i called it took about 6 minutes on the phone and i had the discs two days later.

after you have the recovery discs you can wipe all the partitions off the drive and have just windows 7.
Or if you are like me, have windows 7, windows xp, ubuntu, and osx. :mrgreen:

 

Awesome!

Time to put 7 on!

Is there any info on the computer on the os i might need to provide to acer? Or is it all stickers on the back, So I would be safe to wipe it?

 

Ok, I kept the special portion, now I just need to get all of the drivers