Attempting to reinstall my OS and Reformat....

[Jelenedra]

Well, if you're scared about losing info on the second drive, just make sure to remember to pull it out before reformating or anything like that.

Now that's more than what I trust myself to do, but you might be different. =)

I don't have a problem affording outside help. I just wanted to see if I could manage it myself. I had saved my PC from two nasty nasties before, (again, one was one of those self reinstalling types) and I was hoping to do so again this time.

It just seemed to me that reinstalling would've been an easier way to fix the problem. As this particular nasty was MEAN.

I learned my lesson there. =p

And it's always a good thing to find out where you need to beef up your knowledge. =)

[ZephyrZodiac]

True, but it's not knowledge (or lack of it) that prevents me from getting the second HD out of the case, it's muscle and being able to get down on the floor and get up again!

[Jelenedra]

Ah, yeah that was my biggest beef with fiddling with my tower's fans was unhooking everything to pull it out of the desk only to shove it back 5 minutes later and hook everything back up.

I'm afraid of spiders and after seeing one the size of my hand climb out from behind my printer at work, I'm afraid to get down underneath my desk! 

[ZephyrZodiac]

I don't like spiders either, though we don't get them quite that big here!  (My cat, unfortunately, does like them, and on the odd occasion when I've seen him eat one, it's made me feel more like puking than ever!

[Jelenedra]

It was at work and our cleaning crew doesn't like leaning over the counter to clean behind out PCs. So when we all got upgraded with nicey, nice PCs the tech crew stirred up all the dust behind the old monitors so as the guy was carrying off my printer...There it was, big as can be, with a nice fiddle back.

I screamed....SO loud. I think I gave everyone else heart attacks. (I'm the quiet one at work)

The tech guy though... he just grabbed a paper towel and picked it up and crushed it.

*shudders*

Then he proceeded to show everyone the spider to everyone that didn't see it. Its insides SMELLED, it was so big.

YUCK.

[ZephyrZodiac]

That's really disgusting!  I wonder if you could report him for cruelty to animals?

[Jelenedra]

Hah! Why would want him to do that?

He killed the spider that was big enough to kill kittens!

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, I have met people who love spiders and keep them as pets!  and funnily enough, the only spider I ever saw that didn't make my skin crawl was a tarantula!

[Jelenedra]

That's because they're fuzzy wuzzy!

[ZephyrZodiac]

I know, they just don't look so disgusting, somehow!

[Jelenedra]

I think it's the fur that makes it seem like they need to be petted, not smushed.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, the guy who owned this one was showing it to all our seven-year-olds at a wildlife park talk, it was his personal pet and he was extremely fond of it!

[Hegelian]

Mind you, I just hope I don't have to reinstall for a good while yet, the thought scares me as I have so much stuff I don't want to lose sitting on my second HD, and although I've been assured that reformatting my main drive and reinstalling the OS won't affect theat drive, I just don't really believe it. . . .

Since you have to deliberately choose to delete a partition or reformat a drive, you can't erase the second HDD by accident—that is, unless you mistake for the C: drive.   

You CAN reformat a non-boot partition from within Windows, but not the C: drive itself (or whichever logical drive contains Windows)—Windows will not erase itself. To reformat the C: drive, you generally need to boot to DOS from a floppy disk and run the Format command; alternately, you can boot a WinXP CD that allows you to reformat/repartition your hard drive (no versions of fdisk I know of support NTFS, so the latter is a better option). To delete/modify partitions, you need to run Fdisk.  I suppose there are third-party utilities that will do some of this, but I haven't used them, except for the drive-transfer utility that is/was available from Western Digital.

In the end, though, it is always a good idea to periodically back up any personal data, including downloads and saved games. With a utility like Norton Ghost, you can made an image of all or some of the data on a drive and save it as an ISO file to DVD or another hard drive—Ghost runs as a DOS application for restoring the image. For example, when I wanted to expand my C: drive from a 10 GB partition to the full capacity of a 36-GB drive, I saved an image of the C: drive to a secondary drive (the image is compressed), repartitioned the C: drive, and then loaded the image back on that drive (now 33.9 GB formatted) using Ghost, and Windows never saw the difference, except the drive is now much larger.    Since Ghost installs a service that by default runs automatically and I've used it just that one time, I've disable the service until the next time I need it.

Keep in mind that even if you preserve applications on a second drive or partition, you will still need to reinstall them thanks to Windows's ill-advised registry architecture, which may have seemed an elegant engineering solution but in practice is a real nightmare. (Interestingly, awhile back a popular US computer magazine listed having applications be self-contained as something Microsoft should borrow from other OSes, such as Linux; they seem to have forgotten that Windows 3.x worked just that way, and if you reinstalled it, it would search for and reinstall any apps you had on your PC.)

[ZephyrZodiac]

This seems amazingly complicated!  Oh, how I wish sometimes for Windows ME back again!  I could reformat that from within the System Restore menu!

I know I should back my stuff up, but I only have a CD drive on this PC, it means really transfering everthing over to my second pc thrugh my network, and then copying it to DVD!  Unfortunately, when Tim, who built and upgraded everything for me did the upgrade/rebuild, he put the old CD drive into this PC and the new DVD/CD drive into the other one!  And it would take forever to copy everything to CDs.

As I said, I hope I don't have to do a complete reinstall, so I'm just doing my level best to keep free of the sort of things that could mea I have to! 

Oh, and I did know about the problem of having to reinstall programs after a reformat/reinstall, as that happened before.

Thanks for the helpful tips, though.

[Hegelian]

I know I should back my stuff up, but I only have a CD drive on this PC, it means really transfering everthing over to my second pc thrugh my network, and then copying it to DVD!

Or you could just back up to the second PC. . . .

 

[ZephyrZodiac]

Actually, the second PC would be better as the first, if it had a second HD, as it has Windows XP Pro on it instead of Windows XP Home, and if I could get down and do all the moving around of bits that would be needed, I could move my 2nd HD over, but then I'd no doubt find that I'd need a new CPU or a new power unit or something, so I'm probably better leaving things as they are!  But I will spend a day just backing everything up to either CD or DVD - just have to decide which!