Reformatting / reinstalling Windows - suggestions welcome!

In My Humble Opinion
1

Our 4-year-old computer is getting a little wonkier with every passing month. We haven’t been able to upgrade iTunes lately, our Palm desktop stopped working, we get “unable to load user profile, using default profile”, we can’t re-install the Palm software, and assorted other less-obvious issues. Oddly, the thing seems to be otherwise working adequately, if a bit slow.

We figure there’s enough old software, outdated drivers, etc. that we’re seriously debating simply wiping and reinstalling Windows (we’re running XP-Home). We’re both IT professionals so ultimately should be able to figure out things…

But aside from the obvious (backup all our documents, photos etc.) what other stuff should we be thinking of as we’re preparing to do this?

Simply purchasing a new machine is always the fallback position (and we’ll probably do so anyway). But we thought this might be a good learning experience.

2

Hmm. Some things to keep in mind:

  • Make sure you have at least one working, Internet-connected computer available to you as you do this. Random problems might arise and you want a way to Google for solutions.

  • Try to have as many of the required drivers downloaded and ready to install beforehand as you can get.

  • Likewise, download the latest versions and definitions of anti-virus and anti-spyware / firewall programs (if you’re not using Service Pack 3) and have them ready for installation.

  • You could also consider downloading SP3 as a standalone installer to give you the firewall and anti-spyware package before you ever go online.

  • DISCONNECT the Ethernet (Internet) cable / Wi-Fi adapter from the computer and do NOT go online until you have all the protection installed.

  • If you use any SATA drives, you might need a driver disk (as in FLOPPY disk) during installation.

  • You might want to use the Windows Files & Settings Transfer Wizard to backup your Windows user profile if you changed a lot of personal Windows UI settings (taskbar customizations, Start Menu settings, folder view options, stuff like that).

  • You could consider partitioning the hard drive into two (or more) drives: Keep the OS on one drive, and documents/pictures/etc. on another drive so that you don’t have to manually back up everything again if you want to reformat once more in the future. PLEASE note that this is NOT a substitute for a proper backup solution; if you have important files, they should be backed up on a different physical device and preferably stored at a different physical location.

  • You could use the opportunity to evaluate other operating systems, if you’d like. Vista and Ubuntu are two choices, though there’s nothing really horribly wrong with XP.

  • Consider exporting your entire current Registry somewhere. Not to restore it to the new installation, but in case you ever need to look up a forgotten serial number or something.

3

Reply gives good advice, though I disagree on partitioning: IME there is no need to partition the drive.

Make yourself an install CD with SP3 and any necessary drivers slipstreamed. nLite is good for this. Back everything up, first from within all applicable applications (e.g. Palm), then the whole HDD.

You do not need to reformat! Boot off the XP CD to the command prompt recovery console and rename c:\boot.ini (note that it’s hidden and read-only), c:\Windows\win.*, and then the key directories c:\Windows, c:\Documents & Settings, and c:\Program Files. Now, when you install XP, the install process will not see the old version, and you have an in-place backup - just undo all the renaming.

4

I recommend running Belarc Advisor on the system before reimaging it. It should list all of the hardware devices, most (or all) installed software, and list the license keys for installed programs, which will help you to reinstall them.

5

Thanks for all the advice - apologies for my bad manners in not replying sooner.

We do indeed have other connected computers in the house (my work laptop and Typo Knig’s Macbook), and can use them to do any emergency lookups. And we’ll definitely have the computer unconnected until we’ve got firewalls etc. set up. I’ll have to make sure we have downloads of those on the external drive where we’ll be doing all our backups before reimaging.

Dewey Finn, thanks for mentioning Belarc Advisor - I hadn’t heard of that but it will probably speed things up quite a bit when reinstalling the assorted software. I’ll try that tonight.

For some reason I thought I had the OS disks, but my memory was faulty; we do have a copy of XP on CD-ROM but that was the one we purchased to run on the Mac (via Parallels). But checking into the computer’s documentation there is indeed a recovery partition - supposedly I just have to boot up while pressing F11. That should allow me to go back to factory settings.

I’ll definitely want to get this taken care of in the next few days, so I can still call tech support for recovery disks if need be - warranty expires then.

Reply, wouldn’t I also want SP2? or does SP3 include all of SP2 as well?

I don’t think I’ll bother with partitioning the drive. And of course the thread title “reformatting” was a poor choice, I’m not interested in reformatting the hard drive.

6

SP3 includes all the fixes from 1 and 2, but if you’re installing from an existing Windows boot, you need at least SP1 (but not 2) to install SP3… or that’s what Microsoft says, at least.

However, if you make a clean stripstreamed SP3 XP disc, you can get SP3 from the moment you first boot.

7

This might be for another thread but is virus / malware protection really a problem if you’re behind a NAT router like most users are? I don’t mean for general surfing around but for installing and running updates?

I’ve heard “terrifying” stories of people connecting a newly installed computer to the internet and being infected within minutes but … I’ve done this sort of thing many times and never had problem. I do some volunteer work for a private school and sometimes get donated computers (hopefully with the Windows cds) and need to do a clean install. I usually bring it home and use Acronis Disk Director to delete the partition and create a new partition (or two). I guess formatting would do it but it somehow feels cleaner to delete the whole partition. Then I load Windows which might be XP or Windows 2000 with no service packs so there is always a huge amount of updates. Once I have the basic o/s installed I never hesitate to plug it into my router and start doing updates. Admittedly I don’t really go anywhere with it at that point other than Microsoft Update and getfirefox.com.

For my own computer I always have several partitions and go to some lengths and general awareness to avoid any real data on C:. That way I can always restore C: from an disk image. Somehow that doesn’t seem to work too well for the average non-geek, especially if they use a conventional email client, browser bookmarks etc. I think it’s a good idea to have another partition for big storage uses like photos, mp3s, movies etc so it’s easy to take an image of C: with something like Acronis True Image without it being many many GB. Even that’s tricky because it often seems to get messy trying to tell applications like iTunes to use something other than the default.

8

An NAT will prevent a lot of problems, yes. As for connecting a fresh computer directly to the Internet, the answer really is “it depends”, but why risk it unnecessarily?

9

Just for reference, that error message often occurs when the disk is full or nearly so. Try trimming your profile a bit - clean out Temporary Internet Files, %temp%, etc.

10

Ah - thanks, that’s worth a try - the main hard drive is about 85% full. All the googling I did with the message didn’t suggest a disk space thing. I tried a few things I saw out there (don’t remember what they were) and none of them made this go away. But as it doesn’t appear to be impeding me in any way, I haven’t persisted.

I’ve run the Belarc advisor as another poster suggested - interesting to be reminded of all the different crap that has wound up on the machine over the years. Game that Moon Unit tried 3 years ago? yep, still there. TWO different versions of the telnet software? yep. etc.

But of most concern is the fact that some software simply quit working (the Palm desktop), and others can’t be installed / upgraded (iTunes, new install of Palm desktop). Googling the errors and trying the resulting steps - no relief.

And I have to “upgrade” Quicken soon or lose download capability and I’m worried it won’t work, given the issues with the other major software. So it’s time to get medieval on that thing’s ass.

Will be attempting this tonight - after copying over My Documents (for all the users) to the external drive; have verified that everything we need to save is there including program downloads. I’ll letcha all know how it goes!

11

Hmmm - that seems to say we’d need an actual Windows install disk, which we don’t have (just a recovery partition). I’ll see about having SP1-3 downloaded and ready to feed, at least.

12

I know the conventional wisdom looks down on partitioning these days, but I still do it. It just makes backing up simpler for me, since I use PartImage for backups. I put Windows on C:, the swap file and all temp directories (nero, print queue, %temp%, cd burning, etc.) on D: (I prefer to have this on a separate drive, but sometimes can’t do that*), E: is for Media (music, video, images), F: is for Apps, and G: for non-media Data. By partitioning, I can simplify backups because I only need to backup F:, for instance, when I’ve added or upgraded an application.

  • Yes, I know I’m taking a performance hit when I don’t. I can live with that. I just like having my drive letters be the same from one machine to another.
13

Go to this site and check out the first link on the left side (Super XP Twinking Guide version 2.0). I don’t do the stuff deep in the guide where he talks about editing your registry, but I do most everything up to that point. The 3 - 4 computers I’ve tweaked with this guide all run very smoothly and boot in 20-30 seconds.

14

Well, if the hard drive is four years old and 85% full, I’d think it’s worth it to spring for a new HD. Remember, consumer hard drives will fail at some point.

Makes the back-up/install easy, too: Connect the new drive as a slave, boot from the old drive and copy over any important data. Now connect the new drive as the master boot drive. Boot from the Windows CD and install on the new drive. You still have the old installation on the old drive in case anything goes wrong.
[If you don’t want to spend $100 on the new drive, ask how much your time is worth and how much time this option will save versus other back-up options]

15

Getting a new HD - that’s a good idea.

If you are keeping the old one - I don’t trust any reinstall unless the drive has been DBANed. Good free program, but takes a while to run.

16

Oh, interesting. Maybe I’ll try a few of these things first and see if any of them fix the “can’t install” problem. Can’t hurt, might save some pain.

17

Oh - and the hard drive is only about 2 years old. Something failed about 2 years back; I think it was the motherboard but the first tech insisted it was the hard drive and replaced that, before replacing the motherboard a week later. And no Windows install CD (does anyone ship those any more? I should insist on it next time around) - just a recovery partition.

18

Update: SUCCESS!

I spent a couple evenings this week copying over all the “my documents” stuff and program downloads onto the external drive. Then Friday bit the bullet and did F11 as I rebooted. It went through all its reformat stuff (and I had a bad moment when I realized I hadn’t disconnected the external drive - FORTUNATELY the computer had sense enough not to mess with that. That would have sucked).

Got one “errors were encountered” message during the reinstall process. Apparently it didn’t feel I need to know any more than that! :rolleyes:

To activate Windows, I had to call an 800 number with this string of 54 numbers (9 groups of 6) that displayed on the screen. That didn’t work. So I had to crawl under the desk, transcribe 25 characters onto a piece of paper, plug those into the computer, and call the number again. Then I had to answer questions like “did you ever install that copy of Windows before? how many times, you thieving crook? And did you REALLY make any hardware changes?”. After which I was given another code, to plug into the computer, and Windows was activated.

Display was so huge it was unreadable. It prompted me for driver locations for a bunch of different things (PCI Simple Communications, Ethernet, Video, one or two others) which I was able to download using my laptop. Got the Ethernet controller loaded, then it was able to either use the downloaded versions, or get the ones it needed from the internet. That all allowed me to reset the display resolution so I can see more than 3 icons on the screen at once (slight exaggeration). I should try the modem again - after the brain transplant 2 years ago, it never worked again, and in hindsight I think it was a driver problem. Somewhere in there, I got SP3 (downloaded via laptop) on, before I got the Ethernet working so hopefully the computer remains clap-free.

I’ve gradually been getting software reinstalled. Zone Alarm. AVG. Itunes latest version could load (that was one of the problems before). Ditto Palm software. MS Office loaded nicely, as did the new version of Quicken (the old one was sunsetting in a few weeks, which was one reason I really needed to get the computer upgradeable sooner rather than later). Acrobat and Flash have also been downloaded and updated. I even managed to get the kids’ email accounts restored - which is harder in Thunderbird than it should be.

It turns out that the recovery partition does NOT reinstall other add-ons that the vendor installed - e.g. the CD recording software (I’ve never been able to burn a readable CD using the Windows-native process). Got that just tonight from Lenovo’s web page. I wonder what else I’ve missed.

The hard-drive space problem turned out to be largely due to Itunes - some months ago when I moved the library off to the external drive due to space, I copied rather than moved :smack:. That alone was occupying half the drive. And getting rid of that should help performance.

Can’t say as I’ve noticed much improvement in speed, though I hope reliability will improve and the fact that we can now reinstall software is a biggie.