On 5 Nov 2005 at 17:10, A-NO-NE Music wrote: > This is Thinkpad T20. I need to wipe clean and scratch install > Win2KJP. Here is the problem I always get. DOS can't do NTFS. If I > install as FAT, when I convert it to NTFS later, MBR screws up and I > get BSD with a bogus message telling me possible virus corrupted the > directory. My guess of why it does this is because I _have to_ keep > the second partition, D: intact because that's where all the documents > lives, and installer confuses partition table.
Why not leave the drive alone (i.e., don't reformat) and install Win2K in a new directory. You will end up with two bootable copies of Windows. After you've migrated everything to the new Windows (i.e., re-installed all software and the like), you can the delete the old Windows folder. My current PC was originally NT 4. I upgraded it to Win2K sometime later. Eventually I decided I wanted a fresh, clean Win2K installation (the main reason was to see if it would fix some soundcard driver issues; it didn't), so I just installed in C:\Win2K, and ran dual boot until I'd decided I didn't need the old C:\WinNT folder, and eventually deleted it. I don't see any reason to reformat at all, as most of the accumulated crud you're trying to clean up is going to be in the old Windows installation's registry files. If you keep your programs on a different partition, this is even faster. The issue of C:\Documents and Settings is a harder one. If you replicate old user accounts with the same name in your new Windows installation, you'll want to keep track of which of the similarly-named folders under C:\Documents and Settings belong to which Windows installation. You may also need to change permissions on the legacy account folders in order that you can import data from them into the new accounts. Or you can leave the old data alone and start over. However, there are some things that you may really want, such as Outlook Express email data files and your web browser's bookmarks. Neither of those should be much of a problem. As long as you have permissions on the legacy folders, you can import the old mailboxes into your new OE installation, and import your old bookmarks as well. The only thing you have to be careful about is not to delete the legacy permissions, which will show up under the new Windows installations as GUIDs rather than the old usernames (the new installation can't read the old NTFS security database, so it can match the SID (which is a GUID) to the human-friendly account name). But really, you don't need to reformat the whole drive to get a fresh Windows install. I've never quite understood why anyone would advocate doing so. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
