So I have come to the assumption that windows has corrupted on my SSD and needs to be reinstalled.
So what I'm thinking of doing is installing windows from fresh every 6-12 months and i was wondering what kind of problems I may run into with doing so?
I will be using a 256GB SSD for C: and that will be for the OS and content creation programs (music production and video production etc.) and also for system stuff like Nvidia geforce experience and all that.
I have noticed how ever that a lot of completely random shit gets put there that I don't get told about..
So what I want to know is what would happen if i stick to my plan and re install everything on my C: drive every 6-12 Months? Baring in mind that all data will will be stored on HDDs, so technically no data will be stored on my SSD, just programs, of which when re installed should just be fine because all the music and video etc that they'd be reading would be on the HDD, would that work?
Please ask any questions if this was a little hard to understand, thanks :)
You could do that and it wouldn't be a problem. I wouldn't worry about the random stuff ( your reinstalling the OS and applications so it shouldn't matter) May I suggest however getting a program like Acronis true image or Norton ghost. Then when you get your OS installed, updated, and all your Apps installed nice and clean you could then make an image of your SSD then in 6 mo just drop the image back on and then you will be back to the point when you made the image and you wont have to reinstall all your apps.
It would be the same hardware so I don't think you will have to reactivate at all. Any hard drive will do you could even put the image file on your secondary drive. Just be sure you are backing up to an image file and not cloning the disc to the target drive or it will over-write the target drive.
Personally I usually use Acronis true image. I don't even install the window software part I just boot off the CD select the source drive then select a location to store the .tib backup file I usually dump it on some network storage ( yep supported out of the box) and back it up basically the same thing for the restore.
Got to love "Compression = high" on the imaging software. At the hospital I work at from time to time to pick up some extra work. We often have Win7 images loaded out usually weigh in at a little over 8 GB. using Norton Ghost
Haven't got round to it yet :/ Still have to do a few things before I re-install, I think i'll do it tomorrow, and then later in the week do the backup :)
I do have a side question though, and it's from my other post. Some guy was explaining to me about partitioning and some useful things about it when it comes to the C drive. I noticed that this other HDD with Win8 on it that I was trying to format had 5 partitions on it, and the guy was explaining that it was set up so that you could format the spare partition and it wouldn't affect the windows part at all, rendering a re-install every 6-12 months potentially useless due to nothing in the windows partition being changed unless I went in there purposefully, or a virus went there, to change things. So i was wondering if I could do that here when i re install?
Are you able to partition the drive so that it is exactly the right size for windows? and what if there's an update, wouldn't the partition run out of room?
Also, on my Win8 HDD only 2 of the 5 partitions were showing up, one was called OS and the other was just D or something, the other 3 (Recovery, Good, and something else) were not visible.
Could you post a screen shot from the disk manager? Recovery is used for reinstalling windows from the hard drive. You would hit one of your Fn keys to boot to a utility that would allow you to reinstall windows. The PC stores all the stuff it needs to do that in that partition and it is intentional that it is not really accessible to you. Drives are partitioned for a myriad of reasons and sometimes the reasoning is lost to me Sony used to partition the C drive on there media PCs so that you could store video for editing on that partition and this increased the performance slightly. (that's what they said) the problem was people would fill up C: quickly with other everyday things (and updates) causing all sorts of problems. I would not limit the size of your C: drive to only house windows. Your just asking for trouble down the line. Plus if you have a problem with the MBR you could lose more data than if you stuck with 2 physical drives plust you could keep backups of important things on opposite disks for some redundancy. Windows will create a swap partition that it uses fore some back of the house operations but that partition is small and not normally visible to the end user .
How much room? Is there a way that windows can partition it automatically so that the partition can get bigger if it needs to for updates? It sounded like the guy in the other thread was implying that, something about MBR and GPT??
I am not aware that windows has the ability to automatically resize the primary partition on the fly. you can use GPT to make these types of changes but it can be a bit harry. the best ( and easiest )thing that I have used to accomplish this is Acronis disk director you boot to it and can use it to resize partitions. ( I havnt used it in many generations of the product) Again I don't advocate that you partition the C: drive unless you have a specific need to I would recommend letting the OS use the entire space allowed during the install and to use you secondary disk for data back up, storage, and what not.
OK so it looks like you have 3 HDDs hooked up to your PC. a 60 gb drive for c: a 2 TB drive for E: and 500 GB grive for all the other partitions
the fact that they are primary simple (Basic) is not a problem at all for you (you just cant have more that 4 of them... I think ) but you can not convert it back without formatting the drive. So I would just let it be unless you intend to go trough with your reinstall of windows before you image it. Then I would just delete all the partitions on the primary disk and let windows use the entire disk for install that way all the available space will be on C: for the primary logical disk.
The question is what HDD do you want to use for C: when you reinstall windows? ( Best Practice disconnect the drives you don't want to install windows to during the install plug them in later.)
With Disk 2 ( the 500 GB) it looks like the disk might not be initialized was it from another system?
