I was caught up in MS's dragnet.  A friend installed XP for me after I had suffered multiple crashes of ME.  Trouble was he had a VLK from where he went to school.

I have purchased the WGA kit and now have a legit, bare-bones copy of XP-P on my machine and am awaiting the full retail disk.  When it arrives, I would like to re-do everything in my machine.

I will back up some things (Doc, Pic, Music) onto CD-R's (one of the few things I'm comfortable with doing from my old ME days); will download rest from installation disks and Internet.

Questions:

1.  Does backup "plan" look OK?

2.  Will my new disk start up  on its own?

3.  Will the new disk clean off the old stuff on the hard-drive for me?

4.  When the VLK version was put on my machine, I ended up with the HD showing as F:\ instead of the Millenium Edition  C:.  Should I try to change it or just leave it alone?

5.  Any advice/pitfalls?

Thank, Ron  

 

Dave:  Thanks much for the info, especially the Outlook Express and Favorites info...they would have been long-gone!

Also thanks for the tip to the Knowldge Base article...I eventually might have stumbled my way into it.

Ron  

Ran into another little bump in the road (maybe).  I have decided to back up my stuff to an externa HD my son gave me instaed of onto CD-Rs.      

I have rummaged through the MS Knowledge Base but cannot find the answer to how I can safely change the external's drive letter from C: to X:.

  I was going to change it because my existing internal system letter is F: now but may be changed automatically to C: when I do the format and clean install. I don't want any conflict between two drives named C:.

I went through the steps  RC My Comput>Disk Mangement.  It shows Disk O  (F:) as NTFS, Healthy (System).

Disk 1  is External (C:), NTFS, Healthy (Active)

When I was about to change the external letter from C: to X:, a warning appeared saying "Changing the Drive Letter of a volume might cause programs to no longer run.  Are you sure you want to change the Drive Letter?"

I chickened out and chose "No."  Would it have been OK to choose "Yes?"  And, if I did screw it up, would a System Restore save my bacon?

Any more advice would really be appreciated.  Ron

Dave:  Once more my thanks for your help.  I'll let you know how my little adventure turns out.

Ron

PS:  I was only able to see the first page of most sites I went to in the Knowledge Base.  Switched over from Firefox to IE6...everything showed!

Apparently MS doesn't care much for Mozilla.

Fifty Lakes, Minnesota, USA/
Destin, Florida, USA