Formating....

[Boycee]

Righty...me has had me comp around 1yr 6months and i haven't formated and now it is bloody slow and lots of explorer errors....

So i decided that a format is the only option.....

Now....what i want to know is can i do a total back up of the hard disk (13Gb) just incase i acidently forgot to backup the 192 page essay i forgot to print :E ........can i do a hard disk image....coz i have 2 partitions a 2gb fat 16 and the rest is fat32.....and what program should i use....(have cd writer btw..not feeding diskettes...lol) me cd writer came with CeQuadrat BackMeUp if that helps...

i also take it that this would be compressed....so i would probably do just straight copies of mp3's and driver updates etc....

now once i sorted the backuping.....should i buy windows ME? is it worth it? or just stick with win98 (version 1 btw)

next is should i just do a big 13gb drive.....coz i have had sooooo much trouble with running out of space on C:\ and now i have progs duplicated...with the updated on D:\ and the original on C:\.......

and then.......is it worth all the resettingup etc.....

Could someone then tell me how i actually format and restartup.....just till the point of windows dos setup...cheers....

and then very last.....is there anything real inportant to backup......i from the beginning decided to put everything in my docs so it would be easier to format...but somethings have to go elsewhere....anything i may forget...?

Cheers.....

[Edited by Boycee on 22-11-2000 at 07:17 PM]

[[HLnC]Jay-Dee]

there is no point in backing up your whole hard disk
the only things u should backup is your documents, email, address book, game saves, favorites, icq list, etc. :)

what u could do is uninstall nearly everything on add/remove programs
now u can move all the stuff u want to keep to the 2nd partition so that when u format the first one you save all your work
to actually format make a start up disk and boot up with it
at the a:\ prompt type format c:

and then u have to press yes and it will do it
when done
reboot and at the a:\ type e:\setup to install win98 from the cdrom

i would recommend u to get winme
it is worth the fast boot up feature alone :E

[BluWolf]

As for backing up your data, as was said above just back up your documents etc etc, possibly into your second partition, although why you have a fat16 partition i dont know. Anyway as was said before backup all your docs etc etc and then restart with the boot disk in.

As for the format itself you want to boot to the prompt with cd-rom support enabled, and type the following at the command prompt.

format c:/q

the /q switch allows a quick format

then switch to your cdrom drive and run setup.... If you know that your hard disk has no errors run the following from the command prompt
e:\setup /is

the /is switch stops scandisk from running and starts setup straight away.

Cheers

[Birdy]

Don't forget once you reformat your C: drive CD drive wont work unless you have DOS drivers for your PC, If you've only got one partition where you gonna back up to?
If you need DOS cd drivers for your cd use http://www.juston.com/public/zedtop/cd.exe this
You need to extact it to a floppy disk.
Also grab this file (http://www.juston.com/public/zedtop/pquest.exe) will let you do a backup of your disk to one file that you can restore at any time. I would go for two partitions say a 3Gig C drive for system stuff and programs then keep all your Games work etc etc on your D drive, then when you get to this point again you can just reformat your c drive not touching your games and work. You can also make a image of your C drive and store it on your D so if you ever bugger your PC you can restore from the image :) phew.

[Edited by Birdy on 23-11-2000 at 09:58 AM]

[Boycee]

my new idea.....buy a new 30GB ibm and have a nice new drive...keep the old one (bit of a cheap one that was in ) for getting the data off.....

Then i can set up everything on the new.....then just shove the old one back in and use for the data......then i'm sorted....

involves a bit of expendature.....but my current one is only 5400rpm - so it should give some speed increse plus i don't need to mess around with the particions....and all my old data is safe......

cheers though......