98 SE Upgrade to XP

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Thank you for all your responses.

You're welcome. Glad to help.

I have bookmarked the links for
further reading.
I have been upgrading the PC over the years so it now has an ASUS
A7V8-8 MOBO with an AMD Athlon XP 2200+, new power supply, patched
VCACHE to let me run 1024 RAM and a 80 and 60g hard drives.
I regularly back up the C drive to the D using the Seagate disc
copier. If I clean install XP to the C using NTFS, will it be able to
read the D which will still be set to FAT32? ( For example to recover
all the user mail folders).

Yes. Windows XP, whether Home or Professional, can access NTFS, FAT32,
FAT16, and FAT12, in any and all combinations, regardless of what file
system it's installed on.

Do I have to be careful which XP package to purchase. There seem to
be a number of options - do they all permit an upgrade or clean
install?

Either type of Retail CD (Full or Upgrade) can do a clean installation or an
upgrade. The only difference between the two is that in order to do a clean
installation with the Upgrade version, you need a CD of a previous
qualifying version to show it as proof of ownership.

OEM CDs can do only clean installations, and not upgrades.

(The original installation was OEM but due to lack of
knowledge on my part, I have been using a MS CD for 98SE to do
changes and upgrades, so there may be some irregularities in the
Registry. Is it true that you cannot upgrade from an OEM package)?

No, it is false. You can't upgrade *to* an OEM version, but upgrading *from*
one is not a problem

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Ken Blake, MVP wrote:

A user should have a battery back up to protect against power surges
and power loses. I have one that will give me about 7 minutes of
power in an outage and continue power in a brief power outage like a
brownout.

No argument from me. I completely agree. But that's doesn't mean that it's
safe to do an upgrade without having a backup.

Imo, a computer is too valuable to leave to the mercy of
mother nature and the problems of the power grid.

The purpose of a UPS is not to protect the valuable computer, but to give
you time to perform an orderly shutdown in the event of a power outage.
Without that UPS and orderly shutdown, a sudden loss of power can cause the
loss of the contents of your drive.