I am going nuts...with XP

[stayouttadabunker]

Wow!

[stayouttadabunker]

My computer works great! 

[stayouttadabunker]

The mouse cursor moves faster than I think I've ever seen it move around the screen!

[StatFreak]

Whats a Floppy Drive ??????

I still have a 3.5" sloppy drive on my tower., not that I use it much. And I still have some old software that came on those sloppies.  

I've got at least one 5.25" sloppy drive in my garage. What's more interesting is that I still have an old 8" floppy disc with a copy of FORTH (and some code) on it from college.

[StatFreak]

The mouse cursor moves faster than I think I've ever seen it move around the screen!

So the repair fix the bad file?

Given that your original video showed the computer failing to even get to the windows boot sequence, I'd still find a third party disc checking program and rigorously check the drive for signs of failure or other problems.

The mouse movement can be set as you wish. The location of the settings depends on your mouse software (I use a Logitech with its own setup), but start in the control panel with WinBlows default mouse settings.

[Hotrodslots69]

College memories of vax vms pascal fortran, and many other things I have forgot, and BEER!

[poppo]

Whats a Floppy Drive ??????

My laptop uses a USB floppy and the ONLY thing I use it for is to boot the Ghost disk. For a true clone, the main drive cannot be in use, hence needing to boot off of a floppy. Unfortunately my laptop does not support booting off of a USB data drive or I would be using that.

[stayouttadabunker]

I still have a 5.25" sloppy (sic) drive that I use for animations on my Mikohn.

***Update***

Good news= My computer works great now!
Bad news= I lost everything...
Half-Good News= It's a good thing I backed up everything about 4 months ago.
Half-Bad News= I only lost everything from the last four months...I can live with that.

What went wrong= In desperation, I had totally forgotten which hard drive I was trying to save.
I went into the Recovery Console and typed in "fixboot" ( which it did remarkably well...!  )
Then I went and fully installed XP onto it hoping to get to the page where it says that "if you continue, Winblows will format over the entire drive letter" or something like that?
Well, I never saw the page as I accidentally hit the enter button twice or something
and the XP erased everything and started installing XP in full !!! Arghh!

I shut down the machine by pulling out the plug from the machine then tried to remove the copy of XP hoping to kill the installation - alas, it must of been already too late
and the hard drive must of been reformatted...

What did I learn?= Nothing, I did this 2 or 3 years ago and that's why I bought a new hard drive at that time...good thing I had backed up all of my documents and pictures to a DVD at that time. 

[StatFreak]

College memories of vax vms pascal fortran, and many other things I have forgot, and BEER!

   Although I've never been a big fan of beer, especially standard "vanilla" American beer.

Actually, the FORTH disc wasn't from a programming class, it was from an electronic music class. We had a computer running FORTH hooked up to analog synthesizer modules using a DAC card. Learning to program in FORTH and to then program music in FORTH was an incidental part of the class, not it's focus.

Oddly enough, I learned all of my programming skills on my own, not in school (except for the high school computer club). Can you say "geek"? 


Okay, check out this page. Someone actually created a Venn diagram of the difference between nerds, dorks, and geeks.
Now THAT's  just over the top. 

Difference between nerd, dork, and geek explained in a venn diagram

[poppo]

The mouse cursor moves faster than I think I've ever seen it move around the screen!

Assuming the machine is working, you do know you can adjust the mouse speed in the control panel.  

And at a minumum, run the built in check disk. It will run when you reboot if you are running it on the boot drive.

[stayouttadabunker]

When's the last time you've seen YOUR desktop this clean? 

[StatFreak]

When's the last time you've seen YOUR desktop this clean? 

Looks crowded to me. You should put the link to FF in the quick launch menu.

[stayouttadabunker]

Looks crowded to me. You should put the link to FF in the quick launch menu.

  FU Stat! ( just kidding of course! I'm laughing at myself really)

Wanna hear something funny that happened today?

You'll bust out laughing...gimme a few minutes to type it out...

[StatFreak]

...
What did I learn?= Nothing, I did this 2 or 3 years ago and that's why I bought a new hard drive at that time...good thing I had backed up all of my documents and pictures to a DVD at that time. 

Hopefully that will change now. Don't forget that you'll not only have to reinstall all of the programs you want to use, you'll also have to reconfigure them.

Once you've got the machine running the way you want (programs installed and updated and all customizations done), back up the entire machine, not just your data. THEN, run a backup at least once a month (once a week would be even better, and I won't even try to suggest once a day.) Remember, once you have a full backup you can run incrementals or differentials each day week which should take only a few minutes. Then run a new full backup every - er, well, whatever...

[StatFreak]

Looks crowded to me. You should put the link to FF in the quick launch menu.

  FU Stat! ( just kidding of course! I'm laughing at myself really)

Wanna hear something funny that happened today?

You'll bust out laughing...gimme a few minutes to type it out...

     

[poppo]

What went wrong= In desperation, I had totally forgotten which hard drive I was trying to save.
I went into the Recovery Console and typed in "fixboot" ( which it did remarkably well...!   )
Then I went and fully installed XP onto it hoping to get to the page where it says that "if you continue, Winblows will format over the entire drive letter" or something like that?
Well, I never saw the page as I accidentally hit the enter button twice or something
and the XP erased everything and started installing XP in full !!! Arghh!

But even if it did reinstall Windows, your data should still be there. The only way it would be gone is if you actually told it to re-format the drive and you have to do several extra steps for that. So the program links and such may be gone, but the actual data should still be there. So you may have to reinstall the programs but any files like docs etc. should still be there.

[CommTech]

Don't forget to run Microsoft Update.  I'm sure you will find a lot of critical updates that will need to be done on your fresh install.

[stayouttadabunker]

Oh yeah...there'll be about 90 updates to install...my computer will be on all night trying to accomplish that....
Anyways, here's what happened>>>


I was running around the house looking for my copy of XP right?
Like for about 2 hours!!!
It's amazing what you find when you're not trying to find it!  
I found my old high schools photographs, long thought-missing car keys, a can of electronics cleaner spray, music CD's that I'm definitely gonna install in my car's CD player in the morning, $47.78 bucks in stashed money stuck in a set of Double Diamond strip (lol), and one small bottle of Jack Daniels that I was going to give as a gift one year to my brother...

I had gotten my hands dirty from moving boxes around in the garage so I went into the house and started to wash them right?
I did but I was thirsty, so I turned on the button for the water filter and bent down to take a drink straight from the faucet as I was too lazy to run all the way into the kitchen just for a bloody cup.

I saw that the water wasn't coming out as fast as it usually does so I figured "Ah...maybe it's just a little clogged up, I'll just take the top off and rinse it"

So, I take the cover off of the Moen water filter, inspect it and pulled on the faucet handle to get the water going so I can rinse it...well....the water pressure is very strong here as I have an artesian well...

It shot straight out off the filter's top hole right into my face like a jet nozzle.
I flew back and reached for the handle and turned it off and stood there looking at myself and everything in the bathroom...I mean EVERYTHING, the ceiling, the mirror lights, the counter, my shirt.......dripping, soaking wet!

I laughed at myself for a good 3 minutes, tears coming out of my eyes laughing my head off!!!

[poppo]

Don't forget to run Microsoft Update.  I'm sure you will find a lot of critical updates that will need to be done on your fresh install.

What really blows with a fresh install (especially on a laptop) is if you don't have a driver for the network card. And of course you can't download it if you have no network connection. 

[stayouttadabunker]

I

What really blows with a fresh install (especially on a laptop) is if you don't have a driver for the network card. And of course you can't download it if you have no network connection. 

I have the original MSI motherboard set up disk in the box still.
It has the LAN drivers on the CD.
I've already run it and got online and that's how I'm talking to you here!

[StatFreak]

What went wrong= In desperation, I had totally forgotten which hard drive I was trying to save.
I went into the Recovery Console and typed in "fixboot" ( which it did remarkably well...!  )
Then I went and fully installed XP onto it hoping to get to the page where it says that "if you continue, Winblows will format over the entire drive letter" or something like that?
Well, I never saw the page as I accidentally hit the enter button twice or something
and the XP erased everything and started installing XP in full !!! Arghh!

But even if it did reinstall Windows, your data should still be there. The only way it would be gone is if you actually told it to re-format the drive and you have to do several extra steps for that. So the program links and such may be gone, but the actual data should still be there. So you may have to reinstall the programs but any files like docs etc. should still be there.

I'm not so sure. It's been a long time since I've done a Windows install, but if you don't reformat the active partition then it installs another copy of windows next to the old copy (with new folder names) which is kind of kludgy. In that case the data would be in the old version of his "My Documents". That is not the default installation option, however.

Bunker, I hope I'm wrong but I don't think your data was saved.

[poppo]

I'm not so sure. It's been a long time since I've done a Windows install, but if you don't reformat the active partition then it installs another copy of windows next to the old copy (with new folder names) which is kind of kludgy. In that case the data would be in the old version of his "My Documents". That is not the default installation option, however.

Whether it overwrites the old Windows directory or creates a new one, as long as the drive was not actually formatted, the data should still be there. For example, I have a folder called 'slots' which have all of my slot related files and pictures etc. That folder should still be there.

And I thought you had to press some special keys to do a format (to prevent an oops).

[StatFreak]

It never overwrites them during a new install. That's my point. A standard fresh installation involves a format. If you think about it, how else could MS (or the end user trying to get rid of viruses or other bad files in the operating system directories or registry enteries) know for certain that no residual versions of .dlls or any other files were still in place?

The REPAIR option (from the Windows setup menu, not from the recovery console) overwrites the original Windows directory and files without affecting data or settings, but it's not a complete installation. (When the choice is offered during the installation, the user presses 'R'.)

[poppo]

It never overwrites them during a new install. That's my point. A standard fresh installation involves a format. If you think about it, how else could MS (or the end user trying to get rid of viruses or other bad files in the operating system directories or registry enteries) know for certain that no residual versions of .dlls or any other files were still in place?

I'm not saying that a format is not an option. Pressing the R 'repair' option (which is what I thought Bunker said he pressed) by default just does an over-write.

Question: "How Do I Reinstall Windows XP Without Reformatting My PC?"
Sometimes it's just not an option to reformat a hard drive before reinstalling Windows XP. If you have data that you can't backup or programs that you can't later reinstall, reinstalling Windows XP without reformatting is a must.

Answer: The most effective way to reinstall Windows XP without reformatting your hard drive is to perform a repair installation of Windows XP.

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/operatingsystems/f/reinstxpformat.htm

[StatFreak]

I think he was going to do that before he messed up.   All I'm saying is that the repair "installation" isn't really an installation. I can't tell you how many times I tried using it to fix a windows operating system problem (not viruses or anything like that) only to have it fail because it didn't really overwrite all of the original options in the registry or in the windows OS folders.

In one case I was only missing some files that were accidentally deleted and it didn't even replace them (not drivers, but system files.) even though I knew that the needed files were in the .cab files on the windows disk used for the repair "installation" and were part of a true installation. Unfortunately, the repair console command to recopy the system files didn't get them all, either.

<EDIT> By the definitions given on the website you posted, a "clean" install would be a full installation.