Win 2000 reinstall

[Martin]

I have win 2000 installed on a laptop which will not boot
(inacessable boot device). I have rebooted from the CD and
tried various repair options but nothing is working. I am
now thinking that i will have to reinstall but i am
worried that this will overwrite my files on the hard
drive. I would prefer not to lose the files. Any
suggestions or advice on re-installing gratefully recieved.

Thanks,

Martin

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I have win 2000 installed on a laptop which will not boot
(inacessable boot device). I have rebooted from the CD and
tried various repair options but nothing is working. I am
now thinking that i will have to reinstall but i am
worried that this will overwrite my files on the hard
drive. I would prefer not to lose the files. Any
suggestions or advice on re-installing gratefully recieved.

Thanks,

Martin

Important files must be backed up every week, without
fail. I suggest you consider this event as a wake-up call -
next time you might lose the lot.

If you allow Win2000 to re-install itself over the top of
the existing installation then your files ***should***
be preserved. However, if you want to be absolutely
sure, you can do this beforehand:

- Boot your machine with a Win98 boot disk from
www.bootdisk.com.
- Download ntfsdos.exe from www.sysinternals.com
and run this command:
ntfsdosl /L:EF
- Save your most important and irreplaceable files to
floppy disk, using a sequence of the following
commands:
C: (to get onto drive C
cd (to change to a different folder)
copy (to copy files)
Note that your file names will appear in their short
8.3 form only.

If you have sufficient free space on your laptop disk then
you can install Win2000 in a different folder, e.g. in
c:\Windows instead of c:\WinNT. This will further
reduce the risk of overwriting any existing data files.