Replacing old OS will format entire hard disk?

Question

I am new to Ubuntu. My laptop is currently running Windows 7 with C, D partition as virtual disks.

Now, I want to have a laptop that runs clean and fresh Ubuntu, and nothing else. All old system data, personal data, viruses, trojan should be completely removed and no partition virtual disks (Disk C, Disk D like in Windows). In an other word, my laptop should get started over again like a newly bought one.

I guess "Replace Windows 7 with Ubuntu" option may help. But I am not sure if it will help to format and reset my hard disk OR it will just delete old Windows in C drive and leave other data existed in D drive?

Please advice me. Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

It will just delete old Windows in C drive and leave other data existed in D drive?

It will delete all Windows partitions. The partitioner will assume that all NTFS disks belong to Windows and delete it. It will then create 1 big disk to install Ubuntu. If you do not want this and want the partitions to be split into / and /home/ or /, /home/, /datapartition/

• Use the "something else" option.
• Delete all the partitions so you have one big block of "unallocated space". This will delete all Windows data.
• Create new partitions to your liking. In general 25 Gb for a / partition should be enough unless you want to use servers like Apache or MySQL.
• Allocate a few Gb to a swap area. What the ideal amount is depends on your memory; have a look around AU for some topics about this. What swapfile size to make? I have 4GB RAM and I have 16GB RAM. Do I need 32GB swap?
• Dedicate the remainder to /home/ or a part of it to /home/ and the remainder to a personal partition with a label you set it up with.