Topic: Upgrading the OS

[BIG_J]

Hey I am helping a friend with promblems on their PC, and one of the things I plan to do is upgrade the OS from 98 to XP Pro.  I know  how to do it all but just one thing: Is there any way to save all her old stuff when I reformat the hard drive.  Since it is an old PC there will be no burner.  Is there a way to upgrade the OS without formatting the hard drive?  Thanks for the help you guys are awesome!!

[Sandra]

It may upgrade in windows itself and hopefully not lose anything.
If she has a second partition on her drive or if its a single partition then you can use a program like partition magic to create a second partition, if the drive is big enough.
Move the stuff she needs to the seciond partition then install XP on the first partition, XP will format the partition itself before it installs  

[BIG_J]

Haha I don't think she has enough space.  I just found out that her total hard drive space is only 3 GB.  Thanks though for the information on the partition magic.  I never knew that something like that was available.

[Sandra]

Well if its only 3 gig and shes not far away, why not take her drive out and put it as a slave to yours and either write it to cd/dvd or simply transfer to yours then back again after youve reinstalled xp.
Actually I wouldnt run a pc on XP with a 3 gig drive, I recently had an old pc with a 2.1 gig drive that I wanted to see what the SP2 upgrade was like so I installed XP inc SP1 on it and then tried to use the SP2 cd from MS to install it on it.
It came up with the message that there was insufficient space to unpack it to for it to be able to install.
It did take a later version of XP which had SP2 included but used almost all the 2.1 gig just for that and I didnt add any other programs at all  

[Hiatus]

Her hd is only 3 gigs??  

Also, if her processor is slower than 500mhz, then i wouldn't suggest putting XP on it. It probably won't run too well...


Put Windows ME on there! That should fix it all up!  

[BIG_J]

LOL.  Thanks guys you are the best. I will try to see what will work.  

[Sandra]

DANGER, DANGER

Do not put ME  on it  

Just stick with 98se and it will be fine.
I am just installing it on that one with the 2.1 gig drive and its taken about 400mbs for the OS and runs faster on 98 than on XP too, but it is only a Cyrrix 300 with 128mb of ram of simms  

[Hiatus]

Put Windows ME on there! That should fix it all up!

DANGER, DANGER

Do not put ME  on it  

Just stick with 98se and it will be fine.

lol, sorry sandra...it's hard to be sarcastic over the net...I wouldn't suggest putting ME on a machine either (unless you dont have access to the internet ).

Anyways, hope you can solve all your problems BIG_J!