Clearing out Hard Drive Partitions...

[Fozzer]

Methinks now might be a good time to take advantage of that file overwrite feature of YaBB!

What horrors await me?

When the Great-Grandchildren are being particularly naughty, I type in the blank space....

"If you don't behave yourselves I will kill you!"

Re-size it to 1024 X 768...
...then pop the pic into my screen and show it to them....
...works wonders......
...total silence... ...!

Mind you, it does have the unfortunate side effect of frightening the cat, and turning my milk sour... ...!
LOL...!

Cheers Scorp... ...!

Paul....(I love little children.... ...)...?

[congo]

Fozzer,

I have my system setup very similar to you.

I would format c: drive, and because c: won't format from within winXP, you'll need a 98 startup floppy disk or a winXP CD install disk or perhaps boot from your win98 with your current C: destination drive set up as a slave.

I may be the king of formatting, but............. I still use original installations of much of my simulation and other software, and if required, I make the registry point to those original installs by tricking it.

I do this by renaming my original installation folder to "originalsoftwarename_bak" for example.

I then reinstall the software as normal, then rename that new install to say... "originalsoftwarename_new".

Finally, I rename the old original folder back to "originalsoftwarename" and VOILA! .......your old structure is returned intact and functioning.

I only use this process with software that requires it however, and prefer to run all apps possible off my old installations with no registry notification at all, and, in fact, I prefer to save all my software folders as copies, then uninstall the applications, and run the copy from a shortcut I make in my launch menus.

In this way, I run many applications on my PC with as little registry involvement as possible.

I would suggest that you run critical apps from properly installed setup routines, as Autopilot warned above that not doing so could possibly cause side effects.

Also, Fozzer, If you currently run a dual boot, you will lose the dual boot option I believe, because the PC will not recognize the new winXP install as the old one, instead, it may generate an error and then noboot into windows.

If you run win98 independently of winXP, then it

[Fozzer]

Hi, Congo... ...!

Ta, very much for your keen interest... ...!

I've saved your recommendations in a Notepad for reference and study...!

Thanks Mate... ...!

Paul.

P.S. As you observed, I have Win '98SE and Win XP Pro installed on separate hard Drives.
I just select the required boot-up hard drive sequence from the BIOS settings, ("Delete" key during boot-up)...
Works  a treat... ...!

[caveman16]

Hey Guys,    Found  all of the "above" very interesting .  I suppose I'm somewhat late in posting this as the problem is solved long ago. [ I hope ]    I also had this problem.   What I've done is to prevent it from ever happening again.  [ Green cement  instead of grass  - - -  sorta of ! ]       I put everything on DVD's ,  then list them as you would an index.  I've had some very bad "crashes" and even had file jackets emtied .   This also lightened the load on the PC. Everything seems to work better , faster  and everything is safe now .        caveman