I’m thinking of changing my nick to “computer eejit”- I have 2 computers, one died about a month ago and since then a number of helpful people have been trying to resurrect it with myriad techniques and varying degrees of sucess. Old adage "too many chefs spoil the soup"??? After someone reinstalled the OS (windows XP professional) it seems to have worked again but after bringing it home, I noticed lots of problems. It seems to have at least 2 operating systems, quite possibly 3; I am asked if I want to boot XP pro or XP home- drivers aplenty are missing on XP Pro and even hardware that shows up under Home seems to be missing in Pro the partitions I created back in the day seem to have re-partitioned themselves I cannot connect to the internet (see missing drivers) as the helpful “troubleshooter” suggests I do to fix the problem I don’t know what’s what on the damned thing anymore, I’m so confused I don’t know what to do SO here is my (quite possibly extremely) stupid question: Could/should I take out all the hard drives with my important data that I can’t afford to lose, buy and install a new hard drive for a clean installation of the operating system, put the drives back in and simply “delete” all the windows files from them (old drives) thereby starting with a “clean” installation? I can’t afford to lose my data but the sucker just doesn’t work properly thanks all
What you mentioned seems the most logical way. After you install a new HD, be sure to back up your important data to CD/DVD!
thanks dolphin - but why would I have to back stuff up (over 500 gigs)if I'm starting "fresh" with a new hard drive? I thought I could just put the old drives back in as "slaves"? Also when I try to get rid of all the recently installed windows stuff will it affect the OS on the new drive? thanks again for your input.
Yes, you can put the old drives back in as slaves but remember that the old drive(s) are corrupted. The more you access them the worse they will become. Perhaps an external drive or two might be the ideal for your data. If your really can't affort to lose anything then the best thing to do is back it up! For example, I work on databases quite often. Every session I make changes or alter data in them, I back-up. It would take me a year or more to recreate just one of them, if they were lost! When you say the windows stuff, I take it to mean the OS parts? It will not have any effect on the primary drive to delete that stuff from a slave.
hmmm, corrupted? didn't realize that. When I talk about data it's mainly documents, word, excel etc (for work) and my bit torrent stuff (lots o' stuff 450 gigs+)... I thought after installing the new drive, I could just pop my old ones back in and delete anything and everything that diddn't have a corresponding extension i.e. *.avi, *.doc, *.mp3 etc won't defragging get rid of corrupted files? sorry dolphin I realize these are probably stupid questions/observations but it's been over a month and I really miss the flexibilty of having 2 computers. thanks again Dolphin, for answering my ignorant questions!
No such thing as an ignorant/stupid question. Only that ones that don't get asked. Since the OS will not boot properly (ie driver,etc errors) = corruption. You can delete the things not wanted on the old drive, however, there will still be some corruption. When things are deleted, they aren't really erased but rather marked as to be overwritten. I'd have to get kinda technical to really explain it in detail. Only a format (and even that will not erase everything) will correct most corruption. Defragmenting does [bold]not[/bold] correct corruption. Once again, I'd have to get technical on the properties of a hard drive. The best method has and always will be to back-up necessary files. Your very welcome and I welcome further questions.
