Clean Install Windows 7 or Registry repair....what hurts least

Started by Con, October 30, 2013, 02:20:37 PM

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Staggerwing

Is your bootcamp Win partition your primary Win device or do you have a separate Win box for gaming/etc?
Vituð ér enn - eða hvat?  -Voluspa

Nothing really rocks and nothing really rolls and nothing's ever worth the cost...

"Don't you look at me that way..." -the Abyss
 
'When searching for a meaningful embrace, sometimes my self respect took second place' -Iggy Pop, Cry for Love

... this will go down on your permanent record... -the Violent Femmes, 'Kiss Off'-

"I'm not just anyone, I'm not just anyone-
I got my time machine, got my 'electronic dream!"
-Sonic Reducer, -Dead Boys

mirth

Quote from: Staggerwing on October 30, 2013, 07:10:27 PM
Is your bootcamp Win partition your primary Win device or do you have a separate Win box for gaming/etc?

That's it for my Win gaming right now. It's worked okay for most of the games I own but I made it too small, just 40 GB. At some point, I'm going to get Win 7. When I do, I'll create a new Boot Camp partition with more space. Or I'll just bite the bullet and get a new machine just for running Windows.

Part of the reason, I did the Mavericks upgrade was because I recently purchased Arkham City on Steam. It will run on OSX, but not 10.6.8, so the free upgrade to Mavericks seemed perfect.
"45 minutes of pooping Tribbles being juggled by a drunken Horta would be better than Season 1 of TNG." - SirAndrewD

"you don't look at the mantelpiece when you're poking the fire" - Bawb

"Can't 'un' until you 'pre', son." - Gus

GDS_Starfury

Toonces - Don't ask me, I just close my eyes and take it.

Gus - I use sweatpants with flannel shorts to soak up my crotch sweat.

Banzai Cat - There is no "partial credit" in grammar. Like anal sex. It's either in, or it's not.

Mirth - We learned long ago that they key isn't to outrun Star, it's to outrun Gus.

Martok - I don't know if it's possible to have an "anti-boner"...but I now have one.

Gus - Celery is vile and has no reason to exist. Like underwear on Star.


mirth

"45 minutes of pooping Tribbles being juggled by a drunken Horta would be better than Season 1 of TNG." - SirAndrewD

"you don't look at the mantelpiece when you're poking the fire" - Bawb

"Can't 'un' until you 'pre', son." - Gus

Con

Thanks for the advice I might have another solution that I wanted to run by you.

What if I purchase an SSD drive and install Windows 7 on it.  I would then delete all the windows folders and files on the old HD drive but leave it otherwise intact with all my other programs and folders intact.  Would this work or would you still recommend a complete clean reinstall even with putting in a new SSD that has the operating system on it?

Thanks
Con
PS Ageing Hippies views are welcome just wipe your grimy hobbit feet at the door

GDS_Starfury

That's not a bad idea.  I'm guessing the ssd will only have windows on it.
Toonces - Don't ask me, I just close my eyes and take it.

Gus - I use sweatpants with flannel shorts to soak up my crotch sweat.

Banzai Cat - There is no "partial credit" in grammar. Like anal sex. It's either in, or it's not.

Mirth - We learned long ago that they key isn't to outrun Star, it's to outrun Gus.

Martok - I don't know if it's possible to have an "anti-boner"...but I now have one.

Gus - Celery is vile and has no reason to exist. Like underwear on Star.


Con


Staggerwing

What about all the registry pointers or whatever they're called that those other programs need to function? Some of those programs will probably have their roots deep into the Windows install itself as well. Time for a real computer pro to chime in here...
Vituð ér enn - eða hvat?  -Voluspa

Nothing really rocks and nothing really rolls and nothing's ever worth the cost...

"Don't you look at me that way..." -the Abyss
 
'When searching for a meaningful embrace, sometimes my self respect took second place' -Iggy Pop, Cry for Love

... this will go down on your permanent record... -the Violent Femmes, 'Kiss Off'-

"I'm not just anyone, I'm not just anyone-
I got my time machine, got my 'electronic dream!"
-Sonic Reducer, -Dead Boys

GJK

You would have to reinstall the programs.  Some older games/programs will run without the registry entries but 99% of anything even remotely new will refuse to run and will prompt you to reinstall.

Since you state that you want to get a SSD drive, then I would:

1. Put a folder in the root of C and call it "drivers".  Download every current driver that you can for the hardware in your PC.  Windows 7 is somewhat good at finding missing drivers but you will of course need to be connected to the net, so at the very least, make sure that you have the correct driver for your NIC card.  Dell is very easy to get all the drivers for, just go to dell.com and support and then enter the service tag# on your PC.  HP is pretty straight forward as well.  Generic PC's or ones that are home built can be a bit more difficult.  driverguide.com is an excellent service if you get absolutely stuck finding a driver after reinstalling windows and exhausting all other methods.

Also, Back Up Your Windows Settings to this folder by going to the start menu and typing in "Windows Easy Transfer" and then follow the prompts.  It should let you back it up to the same drive and if so, select the "drivers" folder for convenience.  Else, have a flash drive handy for it.

2. Purchase a cheap USB to SATA drive kit.  I use mine all of the time for "dead" harddrives (you can often access them long enough with these kits to get data off of them).  An example is http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/dd1a/ (there's several brands, that just came up in a search but should give you the idea of what to look for).  Try to find a kit that can use an optional power source, i.e., it has a plug for the wall.  Often the USB alone won't be enough to juice up the drive so the extra power from the wall gets you over that.

3. Take out the old SATA drive and put in the SSD drive.  Install Win7 and restore your saved settings that you backed up.  Check device manager to see what devices are missing drivers.

4. Connect the SATA drive to the kit and plug it in to a USB port.  It will show up as an external drive.  Copy over your "divers" folder and install drivers.  Recheck device manager.  Hopefully you can get online now.

5. Activate Windows.  You may have to call M$ and go through the automated licensing service.  It's easy enough to do.  Run Windows updates.  Come back in a couple of hours.

6. Make sure that you unhide "hidden" system folders.

7. Reinstall programs and games.  One neat program that will help you to quickly install "common" programs is Ninite: https://ninite.com/

8. From your old drive, overwrite the program folders for games that you just installed with what you had on the old drive.  This will restore mods and other tweaks (usually) so that the game will run as it did before (caveat: you'll need to restore your 'saved games' and 'appdata' folders as well (appdata is a hidden system folder so again, make sure that you are set to view hidden folders).

9. Copy over the documents folder, desktop and any other stuff that you want to transfer including C:\Users\yourusername\Music\iTunes\ for itunes (default directory).

10. Disconnect the old drive and store it in a static free bag in a shoebox and put it in your closet.  You'll dig it out again no doubt to look for something else that you forgot.

Google "backup and reinstall windows 7" for more tips.  Example: http://lifehacker.com/5983652/how-to-do-a-clean-install-of-windows-without-losing-your-files-settings-and-tweaks
Clip your freaking corners!
----------------------
Blood Bowl on VASSAL - Ask me about it! http://garykrockover.com/BB/
----------------------
"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son."

-Dean Vernon Wormer

Con

Wow GJK

Thanks for the comprehensive answer.  It looks like it is a painful (relatively compared to getting a colonoscopy maybe not so much painful) procedure no matter what I do.

Reading you answer then the question becomes is what are the advantages of putting your OS on an SSD?

Thanks again
Con

BanzaiCat

If you Mac users are using Parallels, that might be forgivable. Like a hippy that takes a bath once a month.

Staggerwing

Vituð ér enn - eða hvat?  -Voluspa

Nothing really rocks and nothing really rolls and nothing's ever worth the cost...

"Don't you look at me that way..." -the Abyss
 
'When searching for a meaningful embrace, sometimes my self respect took second place' -Iggy Pop, Cry for Love

... this will go down on your permanent record... -the Violent Femmes, 'Kiss Off'-

"I'm not just anyone, I'm not just anyone-
I got my time machine, got my 'electronic dream!"
-Sonic Reducer, -Dead Boys

mirth

Quote from: Staggerwing on November 14, 2013, 08:12:13 PM
'Bootcamp' sounds more manly than 'Parallels'.

and we Mac users can use all the help we can get in that regard.
"45 minutes of pooping Tribbles being juggled by a drunken Horta would be better than Season 1 of TNG." - SirAndrewD

"you don't look at the mantelpiece when you're poking the fire" - Bawb

"Can't 'un' until you 'pre', son." - Gus

BanzaiCat

When I started at Academy's corporate office, I had no idea what was in store for me. When I got to my cubicle/desk the first morning, there was a Macbook Pro sitting there. I'd not worked with a Mac since 1984. It was an interesting year.

GJK

Quote from: Con on November 14, 2013, 02:35:32 PM
Wow GJK

Thanks for the comprehensive answer.  It looks like it is a painful (relatively compared to getting a colonoscopy maybe not so much painful) procedure no matter what I do.

Reading you answer then the question becomes is what are the advantages of putting your OS on an SSD?

Thanks again
Con

The biggest advantage is the stability of the hardware.  Current HDD's are notorious for going bad.  When I was working primarily IT, the issues in order were 1) malware/virus 2) PSU (power supplies) closely followed by HDD's (hard disk drives).  The little arm inside of them breaks off or the platters become scratched from a misaligned control arm and they start to develop bad sectors that can't be read or written to that spread like cancer.  The arm breaking or crashing against the side of the drive (aka "the click of death") was very common.  SSD's are like large thumb drives with no moving parts.  That and their read/seek times are greatly enhanced over the traditional disk drive. 

Many advocate splitting the large drive in to two partitions.  The original reason for doing this was with the older  DOS based Windows, partitions over a certain size lost many megabytes of data because DOS simply couldn't handle those larger partitions.  Nowadays, some split the drive in to two partitions and put just Windows on the smaller "C" partition and all data/games on the "D" partition.  This way, if Windows buggers up, all of your programs/games DATA is safe, though you would still have to reinstall them as outlined above.  Personally, I don't see much advantage to that these days, especially if you go with a SSD (the other option was two physical drives, one for Windows, one for the rest.  If by chance the Windows drive died, you could still access the other drive - again, not an issue so much with a SSD).  One problem too with two partitions is invariably, the user would make the Windows partition too small and found out that soon their C partition was filling up.  This happened because by default programs want to install to the C partition and they would forget to manually change it to the D partition when installing programs.  The C would fill up and they'd lose room for their virtual memory (SWAP drive, which by default would be on the C drive) and then suddenly Windows is running slow as a turtle.  Too much hassle for me, just keep it a single C partition.
Clip your freaking corners!
----------------------
Blood Bowl on VASSAL - Ask me about it! http://garykrockover.com/BB/
----------------------
"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son."

-Dean Vernon Wormer