advice on xp upgrade

[benzimm86]

I am doing an upgrade for my uncle. His computer he uses for his business currently has windows xp home and i am upgrading it to windows xp pro. I read that if you have an xp pro cd with sp2 on it you can just install over the top without formatting which would prevent file lose but i did that on one of his other computers and it got all screwie.

What im looking for is what you suggest doing for this upgrade. I know i need to back up the drive. I will be ghosting the drive before i do anything. But just because i have the ghost image doesnt mean i will be able to get the files off without puting that ghost image onto another drive. How would you go about doing this upgrade?

 

[jeremy]

you dont have to restore the entire image into a partition to access its contents , you can just mount it in windows after ghost is installed of course then extract the files/folders needed

i suggest youll do as follows
1) if the hard drive have only 1 partition , backup the data to cd/dvd discs or usb flash memory or to external/network hard drive/or just connect another internal hard drive and copy the data to it.. , if it have more then 1 partition then copy the important data to that 2nd/3rd.. partition

2) if the hard drive have only 1 partition just boot from the xp cd and delete the partition then recreate (better make 2 set the first one somewhere between 10-14 gb) & format and continue to install , if it have more then 1 partition and you dont wanna lose the data on those partition/s youll have to use a partition manager (like acronis disk director/partition magic/paragon partition manager) and format the main (C:) partition then boot from the xp cd and just install