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Synful Serenity
[H]ard|Gawd
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- Jun 4, 2004
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After hearing another friend of mine complain about having to delete non-essential data on his hard drive that he didn't have to backup but would have rather left there for the convenience, all because of formatting the drive to reinstall XP, I would just like to post a reminder for those that don't already know.
You don't have to format your hard drive for a clean install of XP! In the days of DOS, where programs were self-contained and could be copied on and off as needed, it was easy to just delete the DOS system files when doing a reinstall of DOS. The data and operating system files were separate, so as long as the drive was defragged, reinstalling DOS without touching the programs was in practice the same as starting from scratch. This applies to XP too though, because even though installed programs are integrated with the OS and the installation, any other data on the drive is really separate from the operating system and has no effect just by sitting on the hard drive.
So if for no other reason than for convenience, by rebooting to the XP command prompt and deleting all Windows XP files that you can, you can get away without formatting. First, delete the Windows directory, Program Files, System Volume Information, Documents and Settings, and Recycled. Notice though that since some of the files are loaded into memory, they won't be deleted yet. We must boot to a clean state to delete the leftovers. If you use FAT32, the easiest way is rebooting with a Windows 98 boot disk (there are also third-party NTFS boot disks). Why didn't we just reboot with the boot disk in the first place and delete the files from there? It's because there are thousands of files, and Windows 98 takes much longer to delete them. XP deletes 1000s of files at once in a matter of seconds, while the Win 98 boot disk deletes files one by one, and you'd hear your hard drive clicking for 30 min if you deleted them from Windows 98. By deleting most files in XP, it leaves a small amount for Windows 98 to delete.
After DELTREEing the residual directories, only single files in the root directory should be left. I normally use ATTRIB for this, with -H -S, and then -R -H -S....DIR /A to double-check you've unhid them all. Then delete PAGEFILE.SYS, NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, BOOT.INI, MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS and any other Windows system file left. When all is said and done, you now have a naked hard drive! There is no more Windows XP operating system. Only traces in the boot sector remain (if you reboot to the drive, you will get a message to the effect of "NTDETECT.COM is missing"...This comes from the boot sector of the drive itself), which doesn't matter as the new installation will overwrite it anyway. What you've accomplished is the same end result as if you'd backed up your data, formatted, and then copied it back over.
Is it better to just reformat and then reinstall? I don't think you have anything to lose if you go ahead and do that, but this is obviously an alternative if you don't want to go through reformatting your hard drive, for whatever reason. I usually rename Program Files and Documents and Settings to something else like "Prog Backup" and "Docu Backup", and then after I reinstall my programs on the new XP installation, I copy some relevant data back for some of the programs like saved game files, configuration files, brushes for photoshop, etc. For the documents, you can copy over Favorites, My Pictures, and the like. Then I delete the backup directory. You can obviously copy Program Files somewhere else even if you format the drive, but I am assuming here that either you don't have a way to back everything up (which you should...shame on you!), or don't want to.
This all sounds intuitive to do but you won't believe the number of people who told me you couldn't reinstall Windows XP without formatting! And it's also not as involved as it sounds...after you've gone through this process a few times you'll know exactly what to look for and what you want to keep....I even go through Program Files one by one and just delete the directories I don't need before I even boot to the command prompt. It's usually advantageous for me to merge some files from the old installation into the new one. There's not always a benefit to bypassing formatting as it's nothing to many people to just wipe out the drive and start from there, but at least it's nice to know you have the option.
One more thing: If you type the first user name to be "None" on first bootup and don't include a password for the Administrator account, then only the Administrator account is created. This has limited use, and many people advise against the use of the Administrator account altogether, but if you want the only user of your computer to be Administrator or to brag to your computer-illiterate friends that you are the sole Administrator of the whole computer, more power to ya!
You don't have to format your hard drive for a clean install of XP! In the days of DOS, where programs were self-contained and could be copied on and off as needed, it was easy to just delete the DOS system files when doing a reinstall of DOS. The data and operating system files were separate, so as long as the drive was defragged, reinstalling DOS without touching the programs was in practice the same as starting from scratch. This applies to XP too though, because even though installed programs are integrated with the OS and the installation, any other data on the drive is really separate from the operating system and has no effect just by sitting on the hard drive.
So if for no other reason than for convenience, by rebooting to the XP command prompt and deleting all Windows XP files that you can, you can get away without formatting. First, delete the Windows directory, Program Files, System Volume Information, Documents and Settings, and Recycled. Notice though that since some of the files are loaded into memory, they won't be deleted yet. We must boot to a clean state to delete the leftovers. If you use FAT32, the easiest way is rebooting with a Windows 98 boot disk (there are also third-party NTFS boot disks). Why didn't we just reboot with the boot disk in the first place and delete the files from there? It's because there are thousands of files, and Windows 98 takes much longer to delete them. XP deletes 1000s of files at once in a matter of seconds, while the Win 98 boot disk deletes files one by one, and you'd hear your hard drive clicking for 30 min if you deleted them from Windows 98. By deleting most files in XP, it leaves a small amount for Windows 98 to delete.
After DELTREEing the residual directories, only single files in the root directory should be left. I normally use ATTRIB for this, with -H -S, and then -R -H -S....DIR /A to double-check you've unhid them all. Then delete PAGEFILE.SYS, NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, BOOT.INI, MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS and any other Windows system file left. When all is said and done, you now have a naked hard drive! There is no more Windows XP operating system. Only traces in the boot sector remain (if you reboot to the drive, you will get a message to the effect of "NTDETECT.COM is missing"...This comes from the boot sector of the drive itself), which doesn't matter as the new installation will overwrite it anyway. What you've accomplished is the same end result as if you'd backed up your data, formatted, and then copied it back over.
Is it better to just reformat and then reinstall? I don't think you have anything to lose if you go ahead and do that, but this is obviously an alternative if you don't want to go through reformatting your hard drive, for whatever reason. I usually rename Program Files and Documents and Settings to something else like "Prog Backup" and "Docu Backup", and then after I reinstall my programs on the new XP installation, I copy some relevant data back for some of the programs like saved game files, configuration files, brushes for photoshop, etc. For the documents, you can copy over Favorites, My Pictures, and the like. Then I delete the backup directory. You can obviously copy Program Files somewhere else even if you format the drive, but I am assuming here that either you don't have a way to back everything up (which you should...shame on you!), or don't want to.
This all sounds intuitive to do but you won't believe the number of people who told me you couldn't reinstall Windows XP without formatting! And it's also not as involved as it sounds...after you've gone through this process a few times you'll know exactly what to look for and what you want to keep....I even go through Program Files one by one and just delete the directories I don't need before I even boot to the command prompt. It's usually advantageous for me to merge some files from the old installation into the new one. There's not always a benefit to bypassing formatting as it's nothing to many people to just wipe out the drive and start from there, but at least it's nice to know you have the option.
One more thing: If you type the first user name to be "None" on first bootup and don't include a password for the Administrator account, then only the Administrator account is created. This has limited use, and many people advise against the use of the Administrator account altogether, but if you want the only user of your computer to be Administrator or to brag to your computer-illiterate friends that you are the sole Administrator of the whole computer, more power to ya!
