Remove remnants of previous W2K installation?

[Wolf Kirchmeir]

When I reinstalled Win2000, several things happened:

1) My computer was given a new name (W2K names every computer on which
you install it)
2) I saw _two_ versions of Win2000 on the bootscreen:
-- The first is the current installation
-- The second refers to the previous installation, whcih won't boot
(missing kernel, I think)
3) Disk usage jumped from about 50% to about 90%

I suspect that there are remnants of the previous installation still on
the disk, but as they are marked "system' they are not removed as
redundnant files when I Clean the disk.

So: a) is my suspicion correct?
b) is there any way (within W2K, or with a utility) of determining
which files are redundant, and removing them?

I made the mistake of sizing the W2K system partition at 2GB, which is
tight. I want to recover space on it if possible (I routinely install
apps on their own partition, but becasue of the $%^@%$%$ design
decisions by MS, every app also install parts of itself on C:. I'm
running out of space.)

Thanks very much for any help.

 

[Rick]

When I reinstalled Win2000, several things happened:

1) My computer was given a new name (W2K names every computer on which
you install it)
2) I saw _two_ versions of Win2000 on the bootscreen:
-- The first is the current installation
-- The second refers to the previous installation, whcih won't boot
(missing kernel, I think)
3) Disk usage jumped from about 50% to about 90%

I suspect that there are remnants of the previous installation still on
the disk, but as they are marked "system' they are not removed as
redundnant files when I Clean the disk.

So: a) is my suspicion correct?
b) is there any way (within W2K, or with a utility) of determining
which files are redundant, and removing them?

I made the mistake of sizing the W2K system partition at 2GB, which is
tight. I want to recover space on it if possible (I routinely install
apps on their own partition, but becasue of the $%^@%$%$ design
decisions by MS, every app also install parts of itself on C:. I'm
running out of space.)

Thanks very much for any help.

During reinstallation Win2K detects an existing install and
asks whether you want to put the new install into the same or
a different folder. If you selected the first option, there's only
one installation on your drive. If you chose the second option,
it would have asked you to specify a new folder name, and
kept your original install in its default folder (normally
\WINNT). You can determine whether you have one or two
system folders simply by doing a system-wide search for any
one of Win2K's system folders (e.g. system32).

You can remove the second entry on Win2K's boot menu
by editing BOOT.INI (in your root folder) with NOTEPAD
or any other plain text editor. First remove BOOT.INI's
file attributes:

Start/Run/CMD <enter>
attrib -s -h -r c:\boot.ini <enter>
notepad c:\boot.ini <enter>

Remove the second entry, save the file and close notepad.
Then:

Start/Run/CMD <enter>
attrib +s +h +r c:\boot.ini <enter>

As for disk space recovery, if you have any other partitions
or physical drives on your system, relocate Win2K's pagefile
to one of these other partitions or drives (the latter is
preferable). This is done via Control Panel/System/Advanced/
Performance Option/Change, set the pagefile size to zero
bytes on your system drive, and create a new one elsewhere.

You can also disable Win2K's File Protection to reclaim some
space (anywhere from 40MB to a few hundred megabytes),
but this isn't recommended if the system is connected to a
network, the internet, or is otherwise susceptible to virus
attacks. If you want to do it anyway:

Start/Run/gpedit.msc <enter>

Navigate to Local Computer Policy/Computer Configuration/
Administrative Templates/System/Windows File Protection
and enable the policy for "Limit WFP cache size". Set the
number of bytes to zero. Apply and exit. Then you can
safely delete all files in \winnt\system32\dllcache or whichever
cache folder is specified in Group Policy Editor.

Service Pack uninstall folders can also be deleted, but
doing so will prevent you from being able to uninstall these
Service Packs (not a big deal in most cases).

Also check for and delete any *.DMP memory dump file(s)
on your drive, and for Temp files in any temporary folders.

Rick