Help me with my new hard drive windows install

[D4ng3r]

Hey guys, I would like your opinion.

I have a 160 gig 6-8 year old hdd that is running windows 7 RC right now, with a 500 gig hdd with all my music/backuped movies/games installed on it. The 500 gigger is about a year old.

I just got a 1 tb Raptor 7200rpm (don't worry it is the latest firmware version!) for my birthday. I want to know what the best way to go about installing my just-bought w7 64 bit onto the 1 tb hard drive. I want to only use the 160 gig as a backup drive because it is getting to that point where it may decide to fail on me, and I don't want my OS on it (also the newer drive will be quite a bit faster).

How would you go about it? Disconnect my current 2 hard drives, burn windows 7 to disk, and just do a fresh install onto the 1tb, and then reconnect my 160 gig and my 500 gig and transfer stuff over? How will it recognize that I want to use the real version of w7 instead of the RC if I have them both plugged in? Should I partition the 1 tb drive to have w7 on one partition and files on the other? Is there a way where I can reformat every couple months to maintain the speed of my PC without having to lose files (like I would maybe just save the registry from the old one or something, I dont know how that would work). I heard a guy talking about how he reformats every month but since his xp was on a seperate partition he didn't lose anything...


I don't want to mirror the drives, I'm doing a fresh install. How will the fresh install handle pre-existing games? Will I have to reinstall my games to put them on the registry?

Will saving the registry and replacing the rfresh install's registry deteriorate speed at all? is it possible? I don't know..


Thanks,
Dan

[Zero82z]

Do you want to keep the data on the 160GB drive? Do you want to even keep the 160GB in the PC altogether? If not, all you have to do is hook up the new drive, boot off the Win7 installation DVD, and install it on the drive of your choice.

[D4ng3r]

I want to keep quite a bit of the stuff on the 160 gig drive, and I don't have enough space on my 500 gig to store it all temperarily. I could, however, probably take some time and delete old stuff and make room.... if thats the only way to save it.

[Zero82z]

Well, you could just do a straight installation to the new drive with the 160GB in the system, and set that one as your primary boot disk in the BIOS. Then you'd have it as your OS drive without needing to do anything to the 160GB. Once you have the OS set up, you can copy whatever you need from the 160GB over to the new HD.

[D4ng3r]

Ah, ok that makes sense. Solves one issue! Forgot you could change the primary boot disk.