wipe windows7 partition before restore image

Hi

i have a problem

i would like to wipe windows 7 partition before restore an image
well i would do it , because wiping only with 1 pass (wipe with 00), will erase data and mft and all things

i short , wipe , create a new partition of the same size, restore the image

i don't want to do it for my privacy , but i guess it's better for restoring an image, maybe i'm wrong

but with windows 7 32bit , i'm a bit worried

because i think wiping w7 32bit will erase the activation and i 'm worried that w7 will find a new partition (with different signature and other information about the volume ) and something could not work

i use acronis disk director 10 (not home 11) and paragon hard disk manager pro 10 (not the last 11)

i would appreciate some feedbacks ....

thanks
cheers

 

mantra,

You will be wasting your time. No need to do it.

 

Brian are you sure?
did you make some tests ?

cheers
thanks

 

Thousands of restores without wiping.

 

As Brian says, this is not a problem. W7's activation is nothing special... it's included in your saved image. IF (and I don't personally know) it includes a disk signature as part of its activation mechanism, as long as you're not restoring to a completely different hard disk, there is no problem. The disk signature it would use is one for the WHOLE DISK... it's not based on any partition size or structure.

Like Brian, I have restored many W7 images (even on clean partitions) on the same disk without activation problems. Even if for some strange reson there is an activation issue (I don't believe there will be), a simple call to M$ support and it can be solved easily. This is done all the time when a Windows image is restored to a different system that doesn't have the same total hardware signature. Not to worry...

 

in my experience, you only need to re-activate if you restore an old image.
meaning 2-3 months old.

 

I have a drive, not partition, as my boot drive. I made an image of 7 not long after it went retail. I have restored that image to not only the drive I installed it to, but to my new SSD drive and a few others as well. I have never been asked to reactivate.

In the years of imaging, starting with Ghost in late 90's, I have never had to wipe a disk or partition, and never seen an issue by not wiping. If there were an issue, I don't know how I would be able to tell. No corruptions, no excessive fragmentation (back when I cared about it anyway) and no apparent slow downs in read/writes (back when I used to benchmark all the time trying to get best speeds).

I agree with the others, I don't think you need to wipe before restore.

Sul.