upgrading to XP from win 98?

[JM]

hi
a friend of mine wants to update from Win 98se to XP home ed. she has a
lot of photos and stuff that she does not want to lose .
The win xp Cd she is wants to run we put in while win 98 was running and
pushed the install button and it said it would do a new installation only
and that all the files would be deleted , does that mean the windows 98
files or does it mean ALL THE FILES and her photos will also be lost if she
continues?

 

[Phil Anthropist]

hi
a friend of mine wants to update from Win 98se to XP home ed. she has
a lot of photos and stuff that she does not want to lose .
The win xp Cd she is wants to run we put in while win 98 was running and
pushed the install button and it said it would do a new installation only
and that all the files would be deleted , does that mean the windows 98
files or does it mean ALL THE FILES and her photos will also be lost if
she continues?

It means ALL THE FILES and her photos will also be LOST if she continues
because the hard drive will be formatted. She needs to back up all photos
and other non-Windows data files somehow (such as word processed documents),
for example by copying them to a usb pen drive or by burning them to a CD or
DVD (if she has an ineternal or external CD or DVD writer). The files are
probably too big and too many to copy to floppy disks.

 

[JS]

No matter what the type of XP the CD is (Full product or Upgrade), for
safety's sake make a backup of any files/photos of value.
Copy them to a second hard drive or Burn them to a CD or DVD. Murphy's Law
.....

JS

 

[Malke]

hi
a friend of mine wants to update from Win 98se to XP home ed. she
has a lot of photos and stuff that she does not want to lose .
The win xp Cd she is wants to run we put in while win 98 was running
and pushed the install button and it said it would do a new
installation only and that all the files would be deleted , does that
mean the windows 98
files or does it mean ALL THE FILES and her photos will also be lost
if she continues?

Yes, apparently she isn't going to be able to upgrade. I don't know why
because your post doesn't include enough information to tell me.
Possibly you are trying to upgrade with an OEM version of XP. OEM
versions can only do clean installs. Here are some steps to take:

1. Back up all your friend's stuff. She should have been doing this
anyway. It's really lucky she hasn't lost her data before now.

2. Make sure the computer can even run XP. The XP cd has an Upgrade
Advisor on it. Run it before doing an install. Many computers designed
for Win98 will not meet the system requirements for XP.

3. Make sure you have drivers for the hardware that will work with XP.
If the machine is an OEM box (HP, Compaq, etc.) go to the OEM's tech
support website for the specific model computer and see if there are
drivers available for XP. If not, XP is not supported on the computer
and you should not install it.

If the box is a generic, you'll need to go to the individual device
mftrs.' websites - motherboard, video, audio, network, etc. To find out
what hardware is in the computer, download, install and run a free
system inventory program like Belarc Advisor. The older Aida32 is good
for this, too.

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html - Belarc Advisor
http://www.aumha.org/free.htm - Aida32 (hosted on Jim Eshelman's site)

4. Here is a link to instructions for a clean install:
http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

Malke

 

[David R. Norton MVP]

a friend of mine wants to update from Win 98se to XP home ed.
she has a lot of photos and stuff that she does not want to lose .
The win xp Cd she is wants to run we put in while win 98 was
running and pushed the install button and it said it would do a
new installation only and that all the files would be deleted ,
does that mean the windows 98 files or does it mean ALL THE FILES
and her photos will also be lost if she continues?

Here's a two part answer:

1. With ANY upgrade you should first backup all the stuff you want to
save. Then if something does go wrong with the upgrade, you'll have
the backups to rescue things such as photos, etc. But please do NOT do
the upgrade, go to part two:

2. It's not a good idea to do an upgrade of an OS, people have had
problems caused by doing so.

Your friend should first backup all the things she wants to save to a
separate partition or harddrive or CDs or whatever and then she should
turn off the computer, boot on the XP CD, delete the Windows 98
partition and install XP on the partition where Windows 98 used to be.

 

[Phil Anthropist]

hi
a friend of mine wants to update from Win 98se to XP home ed. she has
a lot of photos and stuff that she does not want to lose .
The win xp Cd she is wants to run we put in while win 98 was running and
pushed the install button and it said it would do a new installation only
and that all the files would be deleted , does that mean the windows 98
files or does it mean ALL THE FILES and her photos will also be lost if
she continues?

If your friend's computer was built for Windows 98 I doubt that it will be
capable of running Windows XP. However, if it is a newish computer that was
supplied with Windows XP, and someone removed that and installed Windows 98,
that's a different matter (but unlikely).

 

[DL]

If you have data that is important to you it should be backed up, whatever
your doing!