When you're installing the Windows operating system
there are number of technical considerations to keep in mind.
So in this video, I'll take you through the process of planning
your Windows installation.
Before you begin the installation,
you're going to need the installation media.
Very often this is provided on some type of optical media,
like a CD-ROM or a DVD-ROM.
But you might also be given all the installation
files on a bootable USB drive.
You have to make sure that the computer you're installing this
on is able to boot from a USB drive.
Instead of booting from local media,
you can also boot from files that
are located across the network.
This is usually done through something called
PXE, which we call Pixie.
This stands for preboot execution environment.
And you not only have to have this PXE server set
up somewhere on your network, but your computer also
has to be able to support booting from PXE.
If you're running Mac OS, there's
a similar process for that operating
system called net boot.
This is booting from over the network,
similar to PXE except it's specific to the Mac OS
operating system.
If you're a system administrator that
needs to install from many different installation sources,
you may put all of those files on a single solid state
drive or hard drive, and you can store
many different installation media.
Sometimes an external drive makes sense
so that you can move from system to system
and simply plug in through a USB connection.
Some of these external drives allow
you to mount an ISO image file.
That means when you plug this in it
doesn't look like a single file.
It looks as if you're connecting an entire DVD-ROM.
And in some cases, you may want to have the installation media
on a separate partition inside of that computer that way
you can boot from the installation media partition
and install into a separate system partition.
There are a few different ways to install an operating system.
One is through an in-place upgrade.
That means you already have an operating system in place.
You already have your documents.
You've installed applications.
And now you'd simply like to upgrade
the application that's in use.
If the new operating system allows for an in-place upgrade
you can simply start the upgrade process while the old operating
system is running and it will simply perform an upgrade
and keep everything in place.
But there are many times when you
don't have the luxury of performing an in-place upgrade
and you need to clean everything off the drive
and install a fresh version of the operating system.
This is a clean install.
One of the things you can also do
is use a migration tool to migrate off your data,
install the new system on this clean install,
and then migrate all of your files
back on to this brand new operating system.
In many corporate environments, you
tend to purchase computers that are
identical on everyone's desk.
So in those cases, you may want to build a version of Windows
that has been customized with your organization's settings
and with applications that are specific to your company.
Then you can take that configuration,
create an image of that, and then clone it
or deploy it to all of those separate systems.
In some cases though you have different kinds of hardware
and you want some flexibility in how the Windows configuration
might be installed.
And in those cases, you can create
an unattended installation.
This is where you can create a file called unattend.xml.
This file is going to have all the answers
to the questions that are normally
ask during the installation process.
You add that XML file to your installation media
then all you have to do is simply
turn on the computer with that installation media
and it performs the entire install
without any user intervention.
If you already have a system that
has an operating system installed,
but you're having some problems with the OS
you may want to try troubleshooting by running
a repair installation.
This will run through a Windows installation,
but it will simply replace or repair
any files that might be bad.
This is not going to modify any of your files.
It's not going to modify your documents
or your installed applications, but it might solve problems
with your operating system.
Many operating systems also allow
you to install multiple versions of operating systems
onto the same computer.
This is called multi boot or dual boot.
And in this way, you can start your computer
and then decide what operating system you'd like
to run during that session.
During the installation, Microsoft Windows
likes to create a recovery partition on a drive
where it installs operating system files that
can be useful if you're running into problems
with the primary OS.
This is also very common to see when manufacturers
ship their computers with an operating system already
installed.
And Windows 8 includes two new installation options,
a Refresh option and a Restore option.
The Refresh option is going to refresh the operating system
files without changing anything with your existing
configurations.
And the Restore option is going to remove everything
and reinstall Windows as if it's a factory-new installation.
One interesting thing about the Windows 8 Refresh and Restore
options is these are built into the operating system.
You don't need any type of installation media
in order to perform a refresh or a reset.
If you were to look at the structure of a hard drive,
the first thing you would see is that there
are these large logical separations
of the drive called partitions.
This allows us to keep data separated.
We might want to put our operating
system on one partition and our user data on another partition.
On many computers, there's a single partition
and it might store both the operating system
data and the user's documents.
These separate partitions can also
be used to separate operating systems.
You might want to have one partition for Windows
and another partition for Linux.
If you were to see Microsoft's documentation
they often refer to volumes.
Volumes are partitions that have been
formatted with a file system.
So if you ever see someone refer to a volume
or a formatted drive they're really
referring to the same thing.
There are two main ways to partition a drive.
One way is to use an MBR partition.
This stands for master boot record.
And this is the way we've been partitioning
our drives for many years.
There are two partition types on the MBR partition style.
The first is the primary partition.
This is a partition that's bootable.
And you can have up to four primary partitions per drive.
Because this is bootable, this is commonly
where you would put a computer's operating
system so that you can boot when the system starts up.
One of these partitions is commonly marked as active.
That means when your computer starts up
this will be the default partition that your computer
will boot from.
If you need more than four partitions on your drive,
you may want to use a special kind of primary partition
called an extended partition.
This allows you to extend the number of partitions
by creating one large extended partition that you can then
separate into smaller logical partitions.
This means you can have many more partitions than the four
primary partitions, but the catch is that you cannot boot
from any of these extended logical partitions.
The other more modern way of partitioning your system
is to use a GPT partition.
This stands for a GUID partition table.
GUID stands for globally unique identifier.
It's a way to set a unique ID to components and software
that's inside of your computer.
Unlike the MBR partition style that
only allowed us to have four separate primary partitions,
with GPT we can have 128 primary partitions.
But we have to be running a UEFI BIOS inside of our computer.
So you don't need separate extended partitions
or logical drives.
You simply keep adding partitions
all the way up to 128 primary partitions on a GPT partition
style.
Before you can install an operating system,
you have to select a partition.
And if that partition has not been formatted,
you have to then decide how you would like to partition
and format that drive.
Sometimes the drives you're using
have already been partitioned.
They might even already have a format on them.
But sometimes the partition that's already on a drive
may not be compatible with the operating
system you're installing.
For example, you may have a drive that
previously had Linux installed.
And its file system and partitioning
may not allow you to install Windows on that same partition.
In those cases, you'll need to remove
the partition and re-partition and format the drives
so that it's compatible with Windows.
At that point, you'll need to decide how you'd
like to partition your system.
Would you like to use master boot
record or would you like to use the GUID
partition table method?
Remember that an MBR style disk can have up to four partitions,
but a GUID partition table allows you up
to 128 partitions.
But if you're going to run with a GUID partition,
your system must have a UEFI BIOS
and you have to be at least configured to run
with the UEFI BIOS or in BIOS-compatibility mode.
Remember that if you turn on BIOS-compatibility mode
you will not be able to run in what UEFI calls
their secure boot mode, which may
limit what operating systems you can run on this computer.
In most cases, you're only going to have
one partition on your drive so you
may want to follow Windows recommendation of using
the GUID partition style if you have disks that
are larger than 2 terabytes.
Adding or removing partitions from a drive
is not something you do every day.
And if you don't know what you're doing
you can absolutely lose data.
So be very careful about what you're doing
and make sure you have a backup before making
any changes to these drives.
Now that you've created these partitions on your drive
you need to format these partitions with a file system
that your operating system can use to store data.
This is usually something that's a FAT32 or NTFS file system.
And it's usually something that's
dictated by the operating system that you're using.
Many operating systems give you some options.
You might have the option of installing
file system as FAT32 or NTFS.
So you want to be sure to make the right decision when
installing the file system.
One of the very first file systems on computers was FAT.
FAT stands for file allocation table.
We've updated FAT through the years.
You may see FAT32 on a number of Windows systems.
This allowed us to have very large volume sizes
and it limited the maximum size of any particular file
to 4 gigabytes.
If you're using a flash drive in Windows
it's probably using a file system called exFAT.
It stands for extended file allocation table.
It allows you to use these large drives.
But more importantly, allows you to store files
on these drives that are much larger than 4 gigabytes.
Because of the limitations associated with FAT,
Microsoft created their own file system called NTFS.
This stands for the NT file system.
And it has been around since Windows NT
and is still supported on Windows Vista, Windows 7,
Windows 8, and later.
This provides some additional features over file allocation
table systems, like file compression, encryption,
some security features, and much more all
built into the file system of the OS.
If you're using optical drives those drives
are probably written with compact disk file
system or CDFS.
This is an international standard called ISO 9660
and it's one where all operating systems can follow
the same standard so that no matter what OS you go to they
can all read that optical drive.
If you're running the Linux operating system then
you're probably not using a Microsoft-related file system.
You're probably running something
like ext3, which is the third extended file system
or you could be running ext4, the fourth extended file
system.
This is very common to see in Linux and Android operating
systems.
And a file system that many operating systems
can run across the network is called NFS or network file
system where you're able to share files across the network
and read and write to those files,
like they were a local drive except, of course,
you're accessing them across the network.
Microsoft adds an additional layer
on top of partitions and file systems called storage types.
The fundamental storage type is a basic storage type.
This allows you to have basic and extended partitions.
You can have separate individual basic disks inside
of your system, but those disks don't have
any additional functionality.
They act as independent standalone devices.
Modern Windows versions allow you to define a disk
as a dynamic disk.
This allows you to do some interesting things,
like spanning multiple disks together
and have it look like one large volume.
Or you can split data across physical disks
so that you're striping information
or maybe you're creating a mirror information, which
effectively is duplicating exactly the same data
across separate physical disks.
Not all versions and editions of Windows
support all of these different features within dynamic disks
so you'll need to look at your documentation to see what
options are available for you.
When you're installing Windows and creating
a partition in a file system it will perform a quick format
on that partition.
This is creating a brand new file table.
If there was a file table there originally
it will simply overwrite the file table that was there.
It doesn't erase any additional information on the drive.
It doesn't change any other files on the drive
and doesn't perform any additional checks.
It simply overwrites the existing file table.
In fact, during the installation a quick format
is your only option.
If you need to perform a full format of a partition then
you want to run a program like diskpart to be able to do that.
A full format as the name implies is much more thorough.
It's not only going to overwrite the file table,
it's also going to write zeros into the entire drive.
That means if you have any data on that
drive you will not be able to recover anything
once that drive has gone through a full format.
This also goes through every sector on the drive
and makes sure that you can write information
to that sector and then read the information off again.
This obviously means it's going to take a lot more time
to go through that entire drive and perform a full format.
There's other considerations you may
want to keep in mind during the Windows installation.
For example, if you're installing using third party
hardware you may want to have those drivers available
so your installation is able to see the drives
inside of your computer.
You'll also want to know whether you're
installing this system as a workgroup
or if you're connecting to a domain.
You may have to check with your system administrator at work
to see how to configure this system
and add it to your Windows domain.
During the installation, you'll also
be asked for time and date, time zone settings, language
settings, and anything that may be regional.
So if you're setting up this computer for someone else
make sure you know that information
before you start the install.
If you have specialized hardware on this computer
or there's software that needs to be installed make sure
you have the driver disks or the installation disks
available to install after Windows
has been put on the system.
And you might also want to check and make sure
that the installation has created a recovery
partition that way if you have any problems in the future
you're able to fix those without having
a separate piece of installation media.