Windows partition/network drive question.?

If you reinstall and do not change the partitions then anything on the second and third partitions will still be there. Only the boot partition should be overwritten and possible data loss. Note if you redo or re-size the partitions then you lose everything on the drive and all data stored in the other partitions. So no formatting or anything of partition 2 and 3 will retain all data in those partitions.

As always back up all material on a physical drive before reinstalling an OS. I think you are seeing "nothing" on the "network" drive because you are looking in the "Public" folder of the drive rather than in the "Network" portion seen through W7>Computer. If you boot from the W7-DVD, select install, choose to install to the existing Windows partition, W7 should say it sees the previous Windows 7 folder and do you want to rename it or delete it. If you rename the old folder, old docs+ will be kept (in the old renamed folder), else you can erase the old windows folder and start anew (MS recommended). MS calls the reinstall saving the old folder a "parallel reinstall" and it isn't considered a best practice. MS says do that, back up your data and then reinstall formatting the partition and starting anew. MS claims stability issues may result from doing a parallel reinstall Some people have run that way for years. Your choice. If you select install to the Windows partition during the pre-install phase and don't delete existing NETWORK partition, the "network" partition should not be changed. That said, back it up if you care about the data. Murphy waits for you and you are late - he's not happy. You can think of a partition as an "uber-folder" and create and delete partitions on the same drive as often as desired. If you don't erase the network partition, it should be ok. Partition data is still forensically accessible after partition deletion. Disks/partitions have to be scrubbed (wiped) to void sensitive data - deleting only deletes file names, not data. After upgrading from Vista to W7, sometimes W7 loses activation (even from OEM). Some technicians claim it's because W7 sees the old data from the previous Vista install and that letting W7 create it's own partition is a better method. I don't have any statistics, so I cannot recommend either way. Since you mentioned a recovery partition, I gave you a link to the Dell Windows 7 Manual Reinstallation page. www.windowsreinstall.com is very good as well, usually having screen shots of the process. DCSE, A+, N+, Win3.0->Win7U

The network drive will be removed from the "sharing" list when you re-install the OS on the system drive, but it will not touch any of the data on the backup drive. It is a separate partition, and Win7 will not touch it unless you tell it to during the install (which you won't of course...) Then just re-do the drive sharing and all the files on the backup drive will be shared on the network again. You may have to reset security on all the shared (network) files, as the security ids on the folders/files will be old ids from your previous windows version.