Mista said:
Bought a new computer a while ago without a floppy drive (that's how
it is these days, I guess).
Although many computers now come without diskette drives, I always choose to
get one with a floppy drive. You don't need them often, but it's a real
convenience to have it when you need it. And they cost only a few dollars.
You can also add them after the fact.
Anyways, in the old days, I used to
reformat my drive every year or so to clean it up.
Ugh. I strongly disagree that there's ever a need to do this routinely,
whever in the "old days," or now. In my view, it's usually a mistake. With
a modicum of care, it should never be necessary to reinstall Windows (XP or
any other version). I've run Windows 3.0, 3.1, WFWG 3.11, Windows 95,
Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, each for the period of time before
the next version came out, and each on two machines here. I never
reinstalled any of them, and I have never had anything more than an
occasional minor problem.
It's my belief that this mistaken notion stems from the technical support
people at many of the larger OEMs. Their solution to almost any problem they
don't quickly know the answer to is "reformat and reinstall." That's the
perfect solution for them. It gets you off the phone quickly, it almost
always works, and it doesn't require them to do any real troubleshooting (a
skill that most of them obviously don't possess in any great degree).
But it leaves you with all the work and all the problems. You have to
restore all your data backups, you have to reinstall all your programs, you
have to reinstall all the Windows and application updates,you have to locate
and install all the needed drivers for your system, you have to recustomize
Windows and all your apps to work the way you're comfortable with.
Besides all those things being time-consuming and troublesome, you may have
trouble with some of them: can you find all your application CDs? Can you
find all the needed installation codes? Do you have data backups to restore?
Do you even remember all the customizations and tweaks you may have
installed to make everything work the way you like? Occasionally there are
problems that are so difficult to solve that Windows should be reinstalled
cleanly. But they are few and far between; reinstallation should not be a
substitute for troubleshooting; it should be a last resort, to be done only
after all other attempts at troubleshooting by a qualified person have
failed.
I would put in my
98/XP bootable floppy to get me to an A: prompt, then format c: and
go on my merry way.
How do I do this now? Can I burn the same files to a cd rom drive and
then set the bios to boot to cdrom first? Would that work?
No, you don't need a diskette drive for this, because you don't need to
format separately from installing. Just boot from the Windows XP CD (change
the BIOS boot order if necessary to accomplish this) and follow the prompts
for a clean installation (delete the existing partition by pressing "D" when
prompted, then create a new one).
You can find detailed instructions here:
http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html
or here
http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org/how_do_i_install_windows_xp.htm
or here
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/XPClean.htm
or here
http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/clean_install.htm