Maximum PC

I feel like shooting myself in the knee for having to ask this question - however, in microsoft's endless quest to make things easier for people who will never do things like reformatting anyway they make it harder on the rest of us who do.

I only had two options -

1. upgrade - pass...
2. new install - advanced - yes

problem - it's saving a copy of the old windows files. I don't have any option to format and get a clean install. It's just kind of doing what it wants to. I don't want a single remnant of the old windows files on there. What good is that? Microsoft needs to change their name to moronsoft with crap like this...

Am I going to have to whip out an old copy of win98 and fdisk the thing just to get a truly clean install or am I missing something?

You are missing something.
When you select the disk, chose the option to partition it instead of just installing. Delete your main partition and create a new one in its place, this will essentially tell it to reformat.
I've done this many times.

okay, thought so - it shouldn't be this umm... aggravating. :p

I have two partitions from the last install that came up - one reserved for system and the other showing as the main partition. It told me to restart the disk at that point to change the partition sizes. I saw no reason to do so - so I didn't.

with regards to this - it reserved 100meg for system on my 1TB drive. seems like a bit much to me. It only used 32meg of that last time.

can I or should I specify max. system reservation space when I do this again?

Let it do the 100mb. When I tried making it smaller, my system had weird trouble.

Leave it alone, its the bootable and recovery info files for recovery mode when your system shits the bed.

Like I said, leave it alone.

this statement indicates that you don't know what the hell you are talking about.

5mb required deleting several files. My computer then started crashing.
I don't remember what I needed the 95mb for, but I'm not gonna mess with that partition again.

I just told you what that partition was for...

Just figured out why it was doing that (I still have that PC. Haven't booted it in ages...).
It was a win7/XP dual boot. A virus had come through the XP part of the system, and I only just found it when I ran it an hour ago to turn it into a server. The virus had messed up some system files, and when it tried to go to the system partition it couldn't find what it needed.
I'm gonna DBAN the drive and start over with Linux. This way, I still get the server.

recovery from 100 megs?

It really just serves 3 purposes. A place for bitlocker to place a key. A boot partition for EFI bios' or a placeholder for a boot sector. The later is particularly handy if you're booting multiple OSes that may need a boot sector beyond the cylinder limit.

The first two is what it was setup for. The later is just an afterthought, although useful nonetheless...

There's a Windows PE environment in that partition, isn't there?

no

Hm, ok thanks.

Accept the license terms, next, Custom, click Drive options (advanced), delete all the partitions.

Your total space and free space should be same, click Next.

That should do it. If you're installing Ultimate it will create a 100mb boot partition which includes the Bitlocker program.

Pro makes it 100mb too, at least on the upgrade version.

Home Premium also creates a 100MB partition.

Honestly to make it less of a headache, just let Windows install and create the 100mb partition. After is all said and done, go ahead and delete the partition. I've done it this way for all of my Windows 7 installs and none of them have failed/screwed up. You don't have to be so anal and make sure that you have your 100mb right away.