Does installing windows 7 erase info already on the hard drive?

[jamesjones626]

My motherboard went out, i was using an old 500 pata hard drive as my c: drive with a 1TB sata drive to hold my downloads. I bought a new board but it only has sata ports, so now i have to use my 1TB drive as my main and old hard drive in my pc.  When i use my win 7 disk will it want to format my drive or will it install windows but keep my info thats there already safe?

[Yenome]

you can reinstall without losing most your data with windows xp and up. all you do is during the install process tell it you want to do a custom install. now you will likely lose the data in my documents and c: and user folders. most time it should backup your windows folder and make a new one. i always split my hdd into two partions at least one bout 60gb for the os and the second for data that way i may have to reinstall some programs but i keep all my data. ive installed windows 7 over xp then installed whs 2011 then windows server 2008 then windows 8 only one that made me format was whs.

[Howard_Casto]

Eh you don't wanna do that.  Your are installing a fresh new OS.... don't pollute it with all kinds of old dlls and registry garbage. 

Get yourself a usb adaptor for that old drive.  Install a clean version of win 7 on your new drive and once you get everything up and running pull what you want off of the old drive.  I mean in terms of installed programs you shouldn't have any.... emulators don't really "install" like your typical windows app does.... you just copy them to a folder.

I'm thinking you'll have to install .net, directx, a video codec pack and that's about it.  The rest you can just copy over and it should work like it did on the old drive.

[yaksplat]

Eh you don't wanna do that.  Your are installing a fresh new OS.... don't pollute it with all kinds of old dlls and registry garbage. 

Exactly this...

[Drnick]

I would just buy a new 250GB Sata drive (Or similar size) and do a fresh install to that.  The drive that you currently have as your secondary drive (1tb) may not have the right partition information on it for it to be bootable without wiping the information.  If the data is important to you then do not install an OS to it. 

As for what to do after that, get a usb caddy for the old drive and you can drag the data off of it quite easily as Per Howards advice

Cheers.

[jamesjones626]

Well i took a chance and just installed windows 7 on my drive of downloads, it didn't delete a thing or want to format since it was in the ntfs format already and there was no previous windows installation on it.  Thanks everyone for your input though.   

[Yenome]

Eh you don't wanna do that.  Your are installing a fresh new OS.... don't pollute it with all kinds of old dlls and registry garbage. 

except in his case there was no dll or anything else on the Hd he wanted to install too only the files he had copied to it from downloading. plus the old dll and registry is cleared out with any windows install including simply reinstalling over an old install. which is why windows now renames the old windows folder so you can move over old documents and like without too much trouble and can then delete the old folder and call it aday.

but good to see you got it done. i was worried the first time i did an install on a hd i didnt want to be formatted cause of data i only had on the hd

[Howard_Casto]

Eh you don't wanna do that.  Your are installing a fresh new OS.... don't pollute it with all kinds of old dlls and registry garbage. 

plus the old dll and registry is cleared out with any windows install including simply reinstalling over an old install.

No it isn't.....  it very much depends on how to do the new install and what disc you have.  Even then windoze is bad about leaving junk or leaving references to junk it didn't bother to copy over.   alot of the calls I had back in the day came from hosed installs from an upgrade rather than a clean install.

[Yenome]

it baffles me how people could even mess up a windows install. to me it just seems like the easiest os to install. everytime i did a install over an old one i lost my registry i would have to reinstall to get the program to work.