Clean Install lessons learned:

Lesson 1: Set C Drive size first!

First Clean Install:
The first time I booted the computer using the Windows 7 OEM 64-bit DVD, I sat back and let it do its thing. The computer had two blank 1TB hard disks. It reported Disk 0 and Disk 1, with an unallocated space of 931.5GB on each disk. I selected Disk 0 and it installed Windows 7 on Disk 0.

I navigated to Control Panel > System and Security > Administrative Tools  Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions > Disk Management. 

C drive 931GB:
The Disk Management window said Disk 0 contained a 100MB System Reserved partition, followed by a 931.41GB NTFS C: drive.

C drive 478GB:
As that was about 900MB more space than I wanted to allocate to C, I right clicked on the C: box in Disk Management and selected "Shrink Volume". The Shrink C: window said that it could shrink to no less than 478MB. It said "You cannot shrink a volume beyond the point where any unmovable files are located."

C drive 466GB:
The Shrink window had a reference to "defrag", so I did a defrag of C, then a shrink of C. This resulted in the C drive occupying 466.88GB of Disk 0, followed by an unallocated: 464.53GB, which I assigned as D.

Second Clean Install:
I did another install booting from the Windows 7 OEM 64-bit DVD. I selected Custom, then I deleted the partitions on Disk 0. Disk 0 then showed System Reserved 100MB followed by unallocated space. I selected New, and I set the size to 40GB (40000MB). Apply.

C drive 39GB: (whew!)
Then it showed 39.1GB total size for Disk 0 partition 2, Primary. I then let it install Windows 7 again.

I navigated to Control Panel > System and Security > Administrative Tools  Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions > Disk Management. 

Disk Management reported 100MB System Reserved, followed by a 39.06 GB NTFS C: drive and 892.35GB unallocated, which I temporarily assigned as D.

Conclusion: If you don't pay attention, Windows 7 will grab everything on the HD for the C drive, and it will spread things out so that you can't use the "shrink" function to reclaim the space. Decide up front how much space to allocate to C and allocate that much space, using the Windows 7 DVD, before completing the Windows 7 install.


Lesson 2: careful of windows.old!

Third Clean Install:
Just to be sure I did things right, I did another install. I booted from the Windows 7 OEM 64-bit DVD. I selected Custom. It said that the existing system would be moved to windows.old. To avoid this I did a format of the C drive before continuing. It appears that the clean install process will save previous installs if they exist.

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