Windows 7 do i need an install

Question

I have just recieved a new mac with OS Lion do i need an instalation disc to load windows 7

Answer 1

Not all that difficult. But you do need to be careful at one particular point (formatting the Boot Camp partition).
1. Use Boot Camp to create a partition for Windows to be installed on. It can be part of the drive OS X is on, part of another drive, or you can devote an entire separate drive to Windows. You are asked this at the beginning of the process. If you use part of a drive formatted as HFS+, it will automatically set up an initial split of 32 GB. There's a couple of problems with that. One, that's not big enough to hold even just Windows 7. Two, Boot Camp can only setup a FAT32 partition for Windows since Microsoft has never licensed NTFS to anyone. So what you do is have the Boot Camp utility in OS X create the initial partition. If you've applied the partition for Windows on a drive already in use by OS X, drag the line it will show you between the new 32 GB FAT32 partition and the OS X partition to make it smaller or larger. You'll have to make it larger of course, so make sure to give yourself enough space for Win 7, and the apps you think you'll be installing.
2. Once you've set up your partition, or a whole drive, the Mac then boots to the Windows 7 DVD. As soon as you are able to make the choice from the Windows setup sequence, choose the option to format a disk. Any Apple HFS+ partitions will appear as unknown, while the FAT32 drive will be recognized, and will be named BOOTCAMP. Choose that partition and do a quick format to NFTS. Then proceed with installing Win 7 on that drive.
3. After Windows 7 has finished installing (through a few restarts) you won't quite be done. You'll notice that the graphics in Windows likely won't be very good, and in general running kind of slow. That's because the Windows DVD has no drivers for Mac hardware. Remain at the Windows 7 desktop.
4. From the Windows 7 desktop, put the Snow Leopard disk in the drive. Windows will pop up the usual message about what you want to do with an external drive. Choose "Run Setup". It will run for a while as the drivers for your Mac hardware are installed for Win 7.
I don't know how this part works for a Mac that came with Lion. If you purchased Lion on a flash drive, you may need to plug that in for the initial drivers from that instead. Read the Boot Camp instructions for Lion. It should walk you through what you need to do.
5. Once that's done, you'll have menu icon in Windows for Apple Software Update. Run that to see if it needs to download and install any other Boot Camp updates, which would any updated Win 7 drivers for you Mac. These will be Windows .exe files. So don't try to install the driver updates from OS X.