Reinstalling Operating System

alan4cult

What is the best way to reinstall Windows XP without losing configuration, files or programs?

Could one take an image of the drive then reformat and reinstall operating system and then reload the image?

If there are people (and I know there are!) out there who reinstall on a regular basis can you tell me how you go about doing it? Thanks.

Red Alert

Your best bet is to 'cleanly' install everything you need (NOT Documents, music files or anything else) like MS Office. Then do any customisations you want like XPLite to get rid of all the annoying stuff etc. Let the machine update via automatic update Once.

Now hop over to the Computer Management console and defragment the drive.

Then use something like Ghost or Partition Image to take an image of the partition, and write it to a DVD or even funkier to an unused partition of your drive.

It's always better to keep documents etc, done separately.

Capt'n Midnight

There is no point in using drive imaging if you want to do a clean reinstall - all you get is what you have. Imaging drives also overwrites all data on the drive - only worth for disaster recovery or if you split the drive into
C: = windows ( 10 GB )
= Data ( the rest of the drive ) - maybe even programs here too !

Windows 3.x was the last time a new install of windows would go looking for programs already on your hard drive. Windows 95 / NT4 all require programs to be reinstalled again if you were to remove the windows folder and install a clean version of windows - registry , shared dll's ( = dll hell ), common files etc.


what are you trying to achieve ?
windows seems to have a half life as the crud accumulates - one example being openmanage - if you install it on you machine and then remove it , the registry will still be bloated and since every windows app has to scan the registry your computer will always be a little slower if openmanage type stuff was ever on it.