When is it the best time to delete these partitions?

[Mr 672A]

Hi
My existing hard drive has three partitions where the operating system lives in one of them. Tomorrow I am installing another hard drive with the existing hard drive and this NEW hard drive will have two partitions where the NEW Operating system will live (Win 7 64 bit) in one of the new hard drive two partitions.
Now the question I want to ask is when is it the best time to delete the old Operating system's partition and the partition next to it so the old hard drive can have only two partitions not three for data.
1/ Do you delete the old operating system partition and the one next to it whilst doing the new win 7 installation during the process OR
2/ After you have fully finished installing Win 7 64 bit on the new Hard drive you use Disk management to delete the old operating system's partition and the one next to it ( yes I know I have to re format ) so I have only two partitions for data on the old drive.

[mtv]

Option 2.

That way you still have a fully-operational OS disk if something goes wrong with the new installation.

[Mr 672A]

Option 2.

That way you still have a fully-operational OS disk if something goes wrong with the new installation.

Thanks!

[mtv]

BTW, you don't need to reformat the old drive, just delete the partition with the OS.

You can then add that space to the remaining two partitions, or just one of them.

[Mr 672A]

BTW, you don't need to reformat the old drive, just delete the partition with the OS.

You can then add that space to the remaining two partitions, or just one of them.

Thank you.
I was considering of disconnecting the old Hard drive before starting the whole process of installing Win 7 on the new drive then after finishing the installation I would shut off the computer and re connect the old drive and by doing this it would give me piece of mind that I would not be installing win 7 over the top of the existing operating system. But I do expect that since I'm not disconnecting anything I will be able to identify who is who and the old drive.
Trust me,, I did two full Win 7 installs about 4 months ago on our family computers now that was before I had my minor stroke and I cannot remember anything about it. The only reason I know that I did it was the wife told me so.

[mandc]

What you plan to do sounds good. Another advantage of keeping the old win disc intact is that you often forget to back up some things from the old disc that you only realize while setting up the new disc. If it is still there you can get that data easily.

[irwazza]

Any particular reason you need to partition your HDDs?

[Mr 672A]

Thank you.
I was considering of disconnecting the old Hard drive before starting the whole process of installing Win 7 on the new drive then after finishing the installation I would shut off the computer and re connect the old drive and by doing this it would give me piece of mind that I would not be installing win 7 over the top of the existing operating system. But I do expect that since I'm not disconnecting anything I will be able to identify who is who and the old drive.
Trust me,, I did two full Win 7 installs about 4 months ago on our family computers now that was before I had my minor stroke and I cannot remember anything about it. The only reason I know that I did it was the wife told me so.

Actually I had trouble starting to install win 7 on the new drive because it saw the old operating system and wanted to start that. I shut it off in the bios and all is ok after that.

[Mr 672A]

Any particular reason you need to partition your HDDs?

Yes one was new and I never have all my eggs in one partition in case if the O/S crashes and the other drive I wanted to remove one partition out of three. All is ok and running extremely well. Ohh I love those SSD and SSHD drives