The installation of Windows 7
The first thing to do is the installation of Windows 7. To do this I had to determine a good strategy. My initial plan was to buy a s.s.d. and install Windows 7 on that disk. This would possibly be the easiest strategy and it woul speed up Windows. That speed gain is mostly the loading of files. The read speed of s.s.d. is many times greater than that of the current mechanical HD’s. I still keep this option open for the future.
My system contains 2 of HD’s in a RAID 0 array. Together a small 1 TB; and because I do not intend to save a lot of data (the PC is designed especially for FS-x) it seemed to me making an extra partition is a good second choice. From Vista this should be possible … yet. Well not so. If you want to shrink the system partition you will face a problem with the disk management tool of Vista. There is in fact a paging file on the system partition, and that is usually placed in the middle of the disk (speed?). It is pretty annoying, that it cannot be moved while Windows is running. You need to move it to a different partition (but I still do not have one yet), or … you will have to opt for another program. GParted for example, but I am in possession of Acronis Disk Director 10. You tell this program from within Windows wich changes you want to make and then apply these changes when you click the “run” button. This will start the process; the system will restart. The partition is created outside the Windows environment. I had opted for a primary partition as NTFS-formatted, of course.
The first attempt
If this is completed, it is really very simple. Start the system on to a Windows 7 DVD, in my case, an English Home Premium 64 bit, and then choose after a number of initial screens of the W7 Setup for a “custom install”. Choose the partition on which you want to install from the list, and the rest will be almost completely automatic. There are a number of restarts and you will still need to make a few choices, and a key to fill out (if you want to activate). The installation of Windows 7 is really very simple. Almost as easy as Ubuntu, or a Mac. And nice and quick; within 20 minutes it was done. Including a little outdated driver for my graphics card, and the good chipset drivers. Only for my sound card, Sound Blaster x-fi Xtreme music, a driver was installed. The card was recognized, however ,not correct. With a second installation attempt I adressed this problem.
At nVidia, I fetched the latest driver for my video card and I did a check on the nVidia chipset drivers. The latter were uptodate, so that was perfect. The videodriver I first downloaded and then installed it. That was all still ok.
After this the misery began. I still do not know the real cause of this. It was by the search of the recommended download Antivir where a script began to rotate what had to be stopped. Yes, I was looking for a security program, and then a security issue arizes. Or was there some other reason; e.g. the format of the partition is not good. For example, does W7 no reformat if something is not quite ok with the selected partition. Or probably I should not have attached all peripheral devices already (my flightyoke and rudder pedals, for example).
In fact this is what happened. I wanted to go to my flightsim input devices, and thought that “Devices and printers” was the right choice to do this. Unfortunately the screen stayed empty and in the address bar, the progress indicator stopped after a long time just before the end. Restarting Windows, that shoeld do the trick. Only then the misery began; checkdisk wanted to restore the partition because it seemed to be corrupt. Strange for a fresh installation! But now it was started on every system start, even if I chose Vista in the Boot Manager. Furthermore, it turned out the eventlog (System) filled with error messages about a corrupt file system. What to do next????
I eventually opted for a radical solution. A complete reinstallation. Read on …