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[Simmura McCrea]

So I'm finally upgrading, and was wondering if anyone knew of a way to do it without having to reformat my HDD. I don't have a spare HDD or 96 DVDs to back it up, and really don't want to download everything all over again. I'm hoping I can just pick a partition to install it to and lose the crap in there (namely XP and some crap I don't care about). Anyone know anything?

[forsaken1111]

How much stuff do you have that you'd want to back up? Could you fit it on dropbox or a similar online backup site?

Regardless, it should have an 'upgrade' option when you start the install from windows XP I believe. I normally just copy my files to dropbox or something similar and do a full wipe. You do pick a partition for install and it won't (shouldn't) go running over anything in other partitions.

[Simmura McCrea]

IIRC dropbox is 250MB max, I have some 450-500GB. So no, I can't upload it. I meant the 96 DVDs literally.

[forsaken1111]

IIRC dropbox is 250MB max, I have some 450-500GB. So no, I can't upload it. I meant the 96 DVDs literally.

Aha. Well you could be a dick and 'buy' a 1TB USB drive from the store, use it for the backup, then return it.

[ILikePie]

Microsoft has a nice tutorial on the subject.

Also, instead of getting a second hard drive, if your disk is large enough, you can split it into two partitions, back everything up on one partition, upgrade, move everything back, and merge the two partitions.

[Simmura McCrea]

It's currently in two partitions, a 1.2TB and a 300GB. The latter contains the aforementioned OS and crap. I just wasn't sure if 7 could be coerced into installing to a partition since the tutorials I've seen online seem to all imply that it'd be wiping the whole disk.

[forsaken1111]

It's currently in two partitions, a 1.2TB and a 300GB. The latter contains the aforementioned OS and crap. I just wasn't sure if 7 could be coerced into installing to a partition since the tutorials I've seen online seem to all imply that it'd be wiping the whole disk.

If you do the 'advanced' install or whatever it is called, you can just wipe out the partition and install it there. In that case don't do an 'upgrade' just install it into the partition.

[Stargrasper]

Like forsaken said, Win7 will happily install to a partition if you can figure out how to tell it to.  In fact, Win7 and Debian quite happily live side by side in two partitions on my machine.  It's worth noting that I could never actually get the upgrade function to work.

On a tangentially related note, I did once trick it into doing a Repair install once to upgrade Win7 Home Premium to Professional.  Totally not useful to what you're doing now, though.