XP Pro 32Bit to Win 7 64 bit - My 2nd HD

[Fulmar]

I haven't been able to get a 100% reliable answer in my search of the internet for this question, hopefully someone here can answer it for me.  I just picked up a copy of Win 7 Pro 64bit and I'm wondering if when I do the clean install of Win 7 I have to worry about my 2nd hard drive being formatted etc.

Normally when I do a yearly reformat of XP, I back up data on discs and some non-crucial easy access stuff I put on my second hard drive.  And before I reformat and physically disconnect that drive to prevent the dreaded wrong drive selection when formatting (I've seen it done too many times).

I'd like to do the above again, but is its current NTFS format going to be valid with Win 7?  I.e. if I disco the drive and reformat on drive #1 and once in Windows I hook it back up, am I going to have problems?

[1701E]

If you're just using a plain old partition for backing up data onto HDD #2 while HDD #1 is being re-formatted, no there will not be a problem.  Heck I've had a whole XP partition for backing up on another HDD (and on same at times) just because I didn't know at the time what I needed backed up (kept going through, "do I need this?  Nah, well maybe").  Just started W7 up and went to the XP/data partitions and got what I needed off (UAC didn't help my patience) and then deleted it and made a fresh one.  W7 handles NTFS Partitions the same way XP does from what I can tell, Plug & play.
If I'm wrong somewhere I'm sure I'll be promptly corrected...I just go off personal experience.

[Tigger29]

No problems at all... of course this is assuming you only have data for backups... any actual programs will need to be reinstalled.

NTFS is NTFS.. Win7 will read it just fine... the absolute worse you might have to do (aside from a coincidental physical hard drive failure at this time) is to 'take ownership' of the backed up files/folders... but that's easy enough to do and probably not even going to be an issue.