Rolling Back OS?

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[Tripod]MajorPayne

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jun 15, 2004
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Hey...

My dad is being frustrated. He tried to install the Windows XP Upgrade from Windows 98, which was on our 2.53 ghz P4 w/ a Gig of RAM, an FX 5200 and a little 12 G 5400 RPM HD. He bought a new 80 GB 7200 RPM drive, and hasn't installed it yet.

I TRIED to tell him just to buy an OEM copy of XP with the hard drive and just start all over, because it would be cleaner, faster, and easier in the long run, even though it would take some setup in the beginning, it would be less time than he would spend fighting with compatibility issues from the upgrade. And does he listen? No, but that's just me being angry because he specifically asked me what to do, then promptly discarded my advice, and now I don't want to fix it for him, because he wouldn't listen to me in the first place. :mad:

Well, he's banging on the keyboard and fussing and cussing and told me he wants to reinstall windows 98, which has got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard, but humor me here. Can he just put the 98 CD in, and it will install 98 over top of XP and semi-work? He now thinks XP is a piece of crap, and I'm trying to tell him it's only slow because he didn't do a clean install and it's on a slow HD to begin with, but he won't have any of that. I think I'm just going to do all this myself in a day or 2, when I'm on spring break. I'm planning on putting his new hard drive in as a slave drive, then formatting it from within the XP install he has now, and then pulling the old drive, installing 98 on the new drive, then installing the upgrade XP CD. I will have to do that, since the "Upgrade" he bought at *Wal-Mart* ( :rolleyes: ) will only install if a liscenced copy of 98, Me, or 2000 is present on the hard drive. This is really frustrating me, and if he had listened, he could have just bought an OEM XP cd that would work on a wiped hard drive and we wouldn't have this problem.

So, in summary:

Dad is pissed because he won't listen to me
Has XP installed over 98, it's giving him a bunch of crap (surprise, surprise)
Wants to reinstall 98 WITHOUT formatting
Can he do it?

All this could be avoided if he would just format and do a clean install, but he won't have any of that. He has to keep all his programs so they will (not) work.
 
Just take the old drive out, and put the new drive in. Then install XP, and show him the difference. I don't think you need 98 on the hard drive to install XP.
 
If you formatted the drives as NTFS, there is no way that the 98 CD will be able to format them. Fdisk will see them as unformattable partitions. So I'm pretty sure that if you try to install 98 over XP, even if you have the drive formatted as FAT32, I think windows will say something like "there is a higher version of windows already here" and exit.

 
I'm pretty sure the XP upgrade disk will just ask you to insert valid media (the old 98 disk) during the install, it doesn't need and actual install on the HDD to upgrade. Then it will perform a clean intsall of XP w/o every installing 98.

His programs will need to be reinstalled. The only way to keep his programs is to fix 98, which we'd need to know what's going on there to tell you what to do.

If he doesn't want to listen to you, why does he call? ;)

 
Phoenix86's suggestions will work. Also, it's a crime to have Win98 running on a machine like that anyway. 2000 or XP is a must.
 
Well, he's about to be putting holes in the wall because he's pissed off at the computer, because he won't listen to me, and I've already told him everything you guys have said. He's just being hardheaded and stuff....

Thanks for the help!
 
Movin' on up....

He's still having trouble, although I've minimized it by freeing up some disk space and cleaning out the registry. It used to lock up if he tried to right-click on the desktop, and I fixed that by getting rid of DrWatson Postmortem Debugger (what the hell is that anyway?). It kept giving me the "Had to shut down" error after a right-click, and I simply uninstalled the .exe from WINDOWS/SYSTEM32, so that took care of that. The weird thing is, I've never heard of it before, and just today it gave him an error on that computer, 3 or 4 predictable times in a row, and it JUST did it to me on this computer....and it's never done that before, so now it has me freaked out. Aparrently it's an integral part of Windows help service. If anyone has any more info on that, I'd appreciate it, cause I'd hate to know I just deleted something important.

I had to fix that right-click error by uninstalling the DrWatson thing, which runs in the task manager as drwtsn32.exe, and by installing the WinXP/2k Nvidia drivers for the FX 5200 in there. He had just installed XP and not reinstalled the drivers, so he was using 98's drivers, and right after I installed the XP drivers and rebooted, it right-clicked fine, and I was able to adjust the display settings from the desktop instead of having to re-route through Control Panel.
 
I think the Dr. Watson post mortem debugger is actually part of the windows OSes....I've had some errors with that in the past....
 
Dr. Watson isn't the problem. Dr. Watson is telling you that you have a problem and tries to upload the data to microsoft to diagnose what's going wrong.


Phoenix is right with reguards to upgrade media (Step Up), you can clean install from CD if you have a 9x CD handy.

If you upgraded, and didn't convert to ntfs, there is an option in add/remove programs to uninstall XP and go back to 98.
 
I'd say that comp. is all fucked up right now and that it deserves a fresh reformat and reinstall....if he will let you, that is.
 
Funny thing is, I've been saying that since DAY ONE. All he does is gripe about how "I'm not spending all that time to get back the data after we start over." And I keep telling him that it will be faster, and better, and smoother, and everything else if he will take 2 days to reformat and reinstall everything. And 2 days is GENEROUS! If he would let me do it, I could have the machine operable in an hour and a half, and back to the present state minus the errors in less than 6 hours. I'm going to try ONE MORE TIME to recover his data from the old hard drive and get it smoothly onto the new one, but I think it's ulimately going to be reformat/reinstall, and I'll get stuck doing it because he doesn't have the patience.

I guess if I F up the files and settings transfer, he'll tell me just to reformat everything, and then I can finally make it work. Hmmm...
 
Sounds like a PC that needs a big enema. I'd sneak out to your local PC store and buy a new hard drive, do a fresh OS install in the middle of the night when no one's watching, transfer the data and reinstall the applications, and then play dumb in the morning as to why everything works. Worst case is that if you get found out you'll still have the old drive handy and nothing's been changed on it.

OK, that's not a serious suggestion. I don't know what the answer is. Sounds like the main issue here is sociological. If this doesn't get fixed soon it sounds like you'll be on the Home Depot forums learning how to patch drywall and match paint.
 
I say just wait till he sleeps...that or slip something in his drink and then do it all while he's sleeping...lock him in the basement, or while he's passed out have a buddy drop him off somewhere (an empty, open field) where he doesnt know how to get back home and do it while hes gone! Seriously, though, he's gotta let you do this, you should show him this thread or something.Give me his email address I'll make one up and act like I'm Bill Gates and tell him that his son sent me an email of the situation and if he doesnt reformat now, the virus he has will take control of the power company in the area and send a massive jolt of electricity to every home in the state, probably killing thousands....dunno, might work.
 
Okay, what you need to do is fix him a drink (when he's NOT tinkering with the computer). Sit him down and tell him exactly why you think he's acting the way he is about the problem, that he does not possess the necessary technical knowledge to solve this problem, and that he wants a solution, a solution you can implement a solution. The first part is critical. If he doesn't know why he's upset, he will never accept your help.
 
you can do a full clean install with 'upgrade' version.

it will ask for a win98 cd if there is no partition(of winxp installation)

but it wont ask for a cd if there is an existing partition.
 
Correct, I have the XP Upgrade, and on a fresh install it just asks you to insert the previous OS disk for a moment, and then you remove it and continue your install with the XP disk
 
Awesome! Ok, last night he got quite frustrated and said "Do what you will with it, just save as much as possible". And he wants me to try the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard within XP before I just manually reformat/reinstall. I don't think the wizard will work all that well, so I'm probably just going to end up rebuilding from the ground up. I'm doing it because he doesn't have the patience, but it's fine, cause at least it will work and he'll get off of my computer.
 
Yay....more problems.

Ok, I got WinXP installed on the new drive, and now I'm trying to rebuild everything. I boot from the new XP install a few times to put on video drivers, and wireless card drivers, and the like, and then I go eat lunch. I come back, and I try to switch the drives so the 80G drive is the master. I pull them out, put both jumpers on Cable Select, and put the new hard drive on the master plug on the IDE cable. Keep in mind I've already booted from it several times. I turn the computer back on, go into the BIOS to check everything, and then I try to boot into Windows. Look at that! NTLDR is Missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart. WTF? I got that error right after I formatted the drive when there was nothing on it, and I just installed Windows. I take the drives back out, check everything, put them BACK in, and end up disabling the larger drive from the boot sequence. It boots fine from the smaller, slower drive, and I can access all the files on the larger drive, but I CANNOT boot from it. This is beginning to annoy me. Do I just need to reinstall Windows, since there's nothing that I need to keep on the new drive anyway? I'm fixing to just do a full format of that drive and reinstall XP, then start over again, with the larger drive as boot drive to begin with.

This PC is about to go out the window. If it does, pics are guaranteed.

Why would it suddenly decide that NTLDR is missing only when it is the primary boot drive? I think this computer is possessed. Either that, or someone installed Microsoft software on it. Who would do that? :rolleyes:
 
Well dude i now what your dealing with but in my case it was win98 not wanting to install.
 
The problem is because the system expects NTLDR (the boot loader that starts loading windows) to be in one place, but because you moved disks around, it is now in a different place.

I would recommend the following.

Take the old disk out for the moment, put the new disk in as primary master, reinstall.

shut down

Put the old disk back in as a slave.

Transfer data.
 
Yeah, that's what I was planning to do, but I just shut it down and I'm letting it sit for about 2 hours. I've been working on it all day, and just getting more and more incensed at the thing. I'm playing some Call of Duty and listening to some music, then I'll go back to that and fix it up. Thanks for the help, everyone!
 
AHHH! I thought about that, then...

Too late. Doing a full NTFS format and starting over with a clean install of XP. I WILL make this work, if it kills me. And it very well might.
 
OK, Issue resolved, everything's up and running on the new drive, after a reformat/reinstall, like I said would be necessary from day one. My dad even admitted that he didn't know what he was doing and was in a mess, which is totally uncharacteristic for him.

Thanks for all the help, and MAYBE it won't be so hard next time. ;)
 
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