Young Pooterstein
December 21, 2007 6:41 PM Subscribe
I have some novice questions about a re-install with dual booting in Windows XP. More inside....
My computer is a little over four years old and has fallen bit by bit into the ranks of the walking wounded. Now I’m hearing a pronounced whirring from the hard drive on start-up and a couple more times during the five minutes or so that it takes to boot up. It used to boot a lot faster and, for that matter, do everything a lot faster.
It had some problems before but everything pretty much went to hell when I screwed up while renewing my AVG subscription and set its virus vault free to wreck havoc. Now I know better, and I’ve caught a lot of that stuff with various free programs. Nevertheless it looks like the system will never be the same again, and I suspect my hard drive might have been near the end of its useful life anyway.
In any case, over the last year or so I picked up a virgin copy of Win XP and an 80 gig external hard-drive and I still have my old CDs that I used for the initial install plus a reinstallation CD from Dell for Win XP service pack 1a.
Can I just install everything on the new hard drive and forget about the old one or should I tear the old one out?
Will I be able to tap back into the old drive without malware crossing over and infecting the new one?
I don’t know much so any and all insights are greatly appreciated.
My computer is a little over four years old and has fallen bit by bit into the ranks of the walking wounded. Now I’m hearing a pronounced whirring from the hard drive on start-up and a couple more times during the five minutes or so that it takes to boot up. It used to boot a lot faster and, for that matter, do everything a lot faster.
It had some problems before but everything pretty much went to hell when I screwed up while renewing my AVG subscription and set its virus vault free to wreck havoc. Now I know better, and I’ve caught a lot of that stuff with various free programs. Nevertheless it looks like the system will never be the same again, and I suspect my hard drive might have been near the end of its useful life anyway.
In any case, over the last year or so I picked up a virgin copy of Win XP and an 80 gig external hard-drive and I still have my old CDs that I used for the initial install plus a reinstallation CD from Dell for Win XP service pack 1a.
Can I just install everything on the new hard drive and forget about the old one or should I tear the old one out?
Will I be able to tap back into the old drive without malware crossing over and infecting the new one?
I don’t know much so any and all insights are greatly appreciated.
This thread is closed to new comments.
Connect your external hard drive now. Copy everything you want from your internal hard drive to the external hard drive - ie, all your documents, etc. Disconnect the external HD to make sure it won't foul up the windows installation, and then reinstall XP on your main, internal hard drive. When the new XP boots up, you'll have access to everything on the external drive, and a fresh install of XP on your main system.
A quick, MINIMAL, list of things you should do first, though:
Make sure you have install disks for all your programs. Even if the programs still exist on the other drive, you probably won't be able to run them, because they'll need registry entries that your new system won't have.
Export your IE or Firefox bookmarks. They'll still exist, but they'll be buried. Easier to export and import on your new installation. Also, make sure you have the usernames and passwords pf any sites you have login information cached for, because that won't transfer over.
Export your Outlook [Express]/Thunderbird/whatever email and profiles, if you can. At the VERY least, make sure you know all the settings for all of your email accounts, including usernames and passwords.
If you have older Windows applications that store data in C:/Program Files, rather than subdirectories of C:/Documents and Settings, you'll probably want to find those sooner rather than later, and move them to a spot that you'll remember to back up.
posted by devilsbrigade at 7:16 PM on December 21, 2007