My nephew has been advised by HP (after an hour-and-a-half tech support call) basically to wipe out his system and start over. In the old days, the procedure was fairly simple. You go to the DOS prompt and run fdisk. Then, you boot from a floppy, install your CD driver, and go from there.
I’m told that XP has no DOS prompt, but I don’t know that for a fact. Anway, here are the questions:
He wants to install Windows98 (he blames XP for a lot of his problems). Should he? Is it still available?
He wants to backup some Word docs and e-mails on floppy, and then restore them to the new system, but isn’t there a chance they’ll be infected by Klez?
What is the procedure for wiping out what he has and reinstalling XP? If there’s no DOS prompt, how will the CD be able to work for installing the OS?
If you can think of anything we should know or look out for, please let us know. Thanks.
You can always start from a floppy in DOS mode.
For now I am sticking with WIN98SE. Yes, you can find it in Ebay and other places. Regarding files he wants to save they should be mostly pictures, music and the like and should be safe. In anycase, he can just copy them and scan them for infections before copying them back to the new installation.
If he can boot from his CD drive then XP will do it all for him. In the installation portion he will have the option of deleting partions and formatting the drive before XP gets copied onto the disk. Its all very straightforward.
If this is a newer system (last 4 years or so) he should be able to boot from the CD drive. He may need to set it in the bios if he can’t, but he shouldn’t have to do that.
I have been running XP for almost a year now with no significant issues. Don’t give into the old timers. Don’t waste your time going back to 98SE. Just push forward with XP and leave the past behind you.
Do NOT just pop in any old boot disk and type “Format C:”. Even if you force the computer to start up in DOS (say, with an old Win98 disk), it won’t recognize the drive on which WinXP is installed. Instead, D: will become C:, E: will be D:, etc.
I would recommend that you go to www.bootdisk.com and download the WinXP bootdisk program (they provide links to the Microsoft download center to get bootdisks for both Home and Professional). It makes things VERY easy, in my opinion.
If your nephew wants to install W98 SE, he can just format the drives. IIRC, even if the drives are FTFS, the bootdisk can still see the drives, just not the files on them.
If he wants to reinstall XP, just make the CD-ROM the first boot device. Insert Disk I of XP and start from there.
However I seem to recall that more and more OEM put the whole XP on a hidden partition on the HDD, so your nephew might have to push a special hot key to start reinstallation.