I reinstalled XP. But when I did it I did not format my harddrive because I couldn't boot up Windows anymore. But when I made another windows install. It booted up. Is it possible to fix the old WINDOWS.0 folder and bootup from there? or will i just need to take all the files from the old user to the old one?
Windows Xp
- Thread starter Blackryu
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MindoverMaster
Golden Master
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You should always do a reformat when installing any OS. Writing over it just causes more trouble. You should have backed up the data prior to reinstallation on another system, as slave. You can not boot off the older installation.
Mak can explain this better than I.
Mak can explain this better than I.
TieFighter
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What was the reason for having to reinstall?
MindoverMaster did bring up a valid point about reformatting - this is important in the case of viruses, as there are several that will not be destroyed unless your entire drive is reformatted. I even go as far as to format with Unix, then go back to NTFS when reinstalling Windows. The way Windows file system works, is that all references to something "deleted" off of your hard drive are remove, and then it is marked to be overwritten when something new needs to be saved. However, this means all of the old contents you deleted are still there and can be recovered with a utility.
If it was just a reinstall for fun, then you might want to try partitioning the hard disk next time with "fdisk" in a dos command line. Then you can access all of the previous saved items from the last install as if they were on a separate hard drive, once you're done going through those items you can reformat just the old partitioned part, and then remove the partition again.
MindoverMaster did bring up a valid point about reformatting - this is important in the case of viruses, as there are several that will not be destroyed unless your entire drive is reformatted. I even go as far as to format with Unix, then go back to NTFS when reinstalling Windows. The way Windows file system works, is that all references to something "deleted" off of your hard drive are remove, and then it is marked to be overwritten when something new needs to be saved. However, this means all of the old contents you deleted are still there and can be recovered with a utility.
If it was just a reinstall for fun, then you might want to try partitioning the hard disk next time with "fdisk" in a dos command line. Then you can access all of the previous saved items from the last install as if they were on a separate hard drive, once you're done going through those items you can reformat just the old partitioned part, and then remove the partition again.
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