clean install (win 7 upgrade) or clone or recovery disks?

[syrahnose]

forgive me if there is a thread already on this, if so, please can someone direct me? I did a search but no luck.

I've finally, after 6 weeks, got a replacement from seagate for failed momentus xt 750. My previous upgrade was from a 500gb hitachi, which I had cloned over to the 750 swapping seagate into my x200 and copying via seatools from old hitachi HD. But I noticed the partitions for Q and S system partitions were full of unused spaced.

I've been using the old Hitachi HD since the 750 failed. I have acronis Home 2012 disk so could clone more esily this time. Or I could use my x200 recovery disks. or i could could clean install using my upgrade win 7 disk, as bought x200 originally when x200s were transitioning from Vista to win 7.

I have a cloned copy of my previous xt 750, but it seemed pretty buggy leading up to crash I'm hesitant to use that to intall on new drive.

Any suggestions? I recall having problems with Win 7 not being recognized as genuine previously when I cloned the drives. I assume if I use recovery disks that this won't be an issue. But then I have to reinstall many programs and drivers.

[BootSectorVirus]

Its up to you on how much work you want to do, I like clean installs when moving to a new hard drive, give me an opportunity to re evaluate just what programs I really need and will actually use.

I would clean install windows 7 myself.

Applying images from one hard drive size to another size are always problematic and usually result in not enough free space on some of the extra partitions, cloning seems to be a better option than image restore when changing hard drive sizes.

[syrahnose]

thanks for your time.

in the end I formated new drive in external. Because I had the problem of going back to Vista with thinkpad's win 7 upgrade, I felt it less a hassle to clean install. I switched drives with new one in x200, then did custom partition pulled in previous 500gb drive's system sizes, and left remainder for my data.

On previous upgrade to seagate's hybrid XT I had problems with 'genuine' windows 7 registration. So I fixed this with the download below. All going well now.


The common cause for these mismatches is a faulty Intel Rapid Storage Tech driver

Download and install the latest version from....

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... iid=dc_rss