Performing a clean installation of Windows Vista

Mastering Windows Vista for Business Professionals
By Mark Minasi and John Paul Mueller

The following excerpt is from chapter two of Mastering Windows Vista for Business Professionals, entitled "Installing Vista."

Check out the rest of this chapter, Installing Vista.

Performing a Clean Install of Vista

Unlike previous versions of Windows, Vista provides a completely new graphically based setup that automates many tasks and provides menu items to perform other tasks such as system recovery. Because Vista uses a graphical setup, the actual setup procedure follows the upgrade and other paths more closely. Consequently, if you're already familiar with one way of installing Vista, you're probably familiar with all methods because they vary only by a few steps. The following steps help you with the clean Windows setup.

1. Boot the computer using the Vista installation disk. You'll see Vista start up and Setup asks you for some basic information.

2. Provide the Installation Language, Time and Currency Format, and Keyboard or Input Method. Click Next. Setup presents the main installation option. However, below this option is a link for the System Recovery Options.

3. Click the Install Now link. At this point, you'll need to enter your product key. This setup screen also contains an automatic activation option that you should keep checked unless you're installing Vista on a machine that lacks an Internet connection.

4. Type your product key and click Next. Setup displays the licensing agreement next.

5. Read the licensing agreement, check I Accept the License Terms, and click Next. Setup asks where you want to install Vista. It shows you a listing of available partitions. Normally, you won't have any problem seeing the partitions, but you can load any required drivers as part of this step by clicking Load Driver. For example, you may need to load a driver to support a RAID drive setup.

6. Choose a partition and click Next. If the partition you choose contains a previous version of Windows (likely in this case), Setup displays a warning message. Click OK to close this message box. Follow any remaining prompts to perform setups for your unique machine configuration.

7. Complete the setup using the steps in the "The Installation Paths Converge" section of the chapter.

Continue to Performing a BitLocker installation of Windows Vista.

Mark Minasi is a best-selling author, commentator and all-around alpha geek. Mark is best known for his books in the Mastering Windows series. What separates him from others is that he knows how to explain technical things to normal humans, and make them laugh while doing it. Mark's firm, MR&D, is based in Pungo, a town in Virginia's Tidewater area that is distinguished by having one -- and only one -- traffic light. Copyright 2007 TechTarget

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