New life for the old biddy

Just build a new box and I want to upgrade (via reformat) the old one for the kid's room.

It is currently:
ASUS CUCL2 mobo with P-III, 1Ghz, 512Mb SDRAM
80Gb Primary HDD and a 120Gb secondary.
W98SE

I want to install a new XP Home that I have and start over. I can handle most of it, just need help with the first part... the reformat, install XP Home, set up Admin, etc.

Does the conversion of W98SE to XP Home make it a bit complex?? Thanks, Larry

 

The windows installation wizard guide you through it.

 

It's all reasonably straight forward in Setup. Setup will identify the current installation and ask if you want to upgrade or format. Choose the file system type (FAT32 or NTFS). During installation you will just need to put in things like computer name, your details, the Product Key, regional/time settings etc. When you are about to start for the first time it will ask about making User Accounts. Choose one for each of the potential users so that they can have individual workspaces, settings, desktop themes, etc.

You should not need to, but at this stage you could easily start again if something did not seem right.

Don't forget to install a good set of all the drivers.

Matt

 

Lar:

Unless you have a reason to keep anything software-wise, you may be better off to save any data you want and then do a clean installation. Just boot with the XP CD (Upgrade, OEM or Retail) and you will be given an opportunity to delete existing partitions, create a new partiton(s) and format the drive. I'd suggest disconnecting your secondary drive before doing the installation so all of your files including your boot files wind up on one drive. If its an Upgrade CD, you may prompted to insert a 9X or 2K CD for verification of an earlier system but since you have 9x on there it will more than likely skip this step. If its an OEM or Retail CD, you won't get prompted. Once you have everything loaded and all drivers installed, you can reconnect the secondary HDD and use the drive management tool to clean up that drive and reformat it too.

 

Thanks gang,

Are there any reasons that I should maintain FAT32 over NTFS?

 

For about 9 years I've used FAT32 without any trouble. But recently when I rebuilt both my business box and even my gaming box(!), I went with NTFS.

IMHO, the only advantage that FAT32 has over NTFS is that you can boot up a floppy with FDISK and do whatever you please to your system: format, re-partition, etc.

I ran into a bit of a brick wall on a system that had two NTFS partitions and was visciously infected with spyware. I went to re-format and re-partition it to rid the system of infection but found that no freeware utility on the internet will let you do that to an NTFS partition. I was told that the only thing that could help me do this was the WinXP system disk. Well I remember the steps needed to even to get to this point in an XP install and I found this to be totally unacceptable and I ended up re-imaging the C: partition and then formatting the D: partition from within XP. This was not ideal and could have resulting in re-infection.

To summarize, I find the options available to format and re-partition NTFS volumes to be unacceptable and a major PITA. With FAT32, you can do anything: copy off data in a DOS environment, format, and re-partition.

But I am using NTFS on most all of my systems now. What I need is a boot CD that will let me do ANYTHING AND I MEAN ANYTHING I want with an NTFS partition. I'm still looking for it.

Gary

 

Hi Chris,

Have you looked into BartPE?

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

Regards - Charles

 

Well, I am and running (instead of sleeping)!!

Got all my boards back in, I formated my 2nd HDD. All is good. I have some trouble with the primary HDD not being recognized occassionally upon boot up. Better now, I think. Could have been a master/slave jumper setting thing.

I was wondering something. I would like to put a little zip into it. The board is an ASUS CUSL2, for which this CPU is the max it can take. The CPU is a P-III 1Gb. Is there anything else I can do to it? I am going to Everst it and find out more about the chipset and memory sticks (2x256mb). PC133, I think.

Thanks, Lar

 

Gave up on this one. Apparently, this board was touted as an OC dream (and maybe it was in its day) but it is actually pretty archaic. There are divider ratios for the AGP and PCI busses that cannot be exceeded but there are no tools for adjusting them. When the CPU clock speed is raised, the other busses bump up by ratio, too. I lowered the AGP setting from 4x to 2x (prob hurting my VGA board's performance) but there is no way to adj the PCI buss. One crash after another. I finally just went back to stock as even the paltry bump from 133 to 150MHz was not perfectly stable. Adjusting vCore did absolutely nothing except add another source of instability. The CPU multiplier is pre-set.

I had read a ways back, too, that the 1GHz P-III is actually only a 930 with a bumped up vCore (Intel....tsk,tsk,tsk, shame on you). If so, that would answer a lot of questions on its inherent resistance to OC efforts. The limited BIOS adjustments put the nail in the coffin.

Sure was fun, though!

 

Sounds to me like a monster has been created - LARacula ......... You sir, have the bug - ain't it fun though?

 

Just my two cents on this one. MS has a utility available called Delpart that will delete NTFS partitions that runs in a dos environment. It will fit onto a Win98 boot floppy.
You can get Delpart here.
http://www.svrops.com/svrops/dwnldutil.htm

 

Charles, I found bootdisk utilities on the net that would support the NTFS file system and let you read the files but none of them would let you format or re-partition them.

I looked through the BartPE faq and the above functions were not to be found. I'd put a 10-spot on BartPE not being able to do them either. If if can do these things then the web page should explicitly mention that.

Mark, thanks for the link - I will check it out.

Gary