[geno368]

I have a trashed system on my hands from a cousin. He has his XP cd and wants me to reload...Should I reformat or what? Thanks

[GigaWatt]

first, transfer all needed data on some other partition, then reformat and install XP on a nice clean partition...

[WxMan1]

Yup.



Very good idea is to Ghost image the "trashed" drive to another HDD. This'll allow recovery of various sundry items that are a pain to track down. Valuable stuff accumulated over time includes:

Custom.dic
eMail dbx files (after recreating identities, overwrite defaults with backups - Windows never'll know the difference)
address book (WAB & WA~ files)
favorites - major league bummer to lose those
cookies (if you have lots of websites with autologins you'd rather not lose)
sounds (\windows\media)
theme files - *.theme - save current scheme as CUSTOM_SCHEME and then search for it.

Export:

HKCU\Control Panel\Cursors\Schemes

You'll need to be able to restore any custom cursors from Windows\Cursors though. Importing the above Cursors/Schemes.reg file will save having to manually having to reconfigure each custom cursor that may exist.

Restore wpa.dbl from original WINDOWS\system32 folder to the new install (it will prevent needing to re-active the installed copy of Windows).

There's a bunch of stuff that can be salvaged from an image backup even if the original system is un-bootable. With Ghost Explorer one can restore items piecemiel akin to copy and paste via Windows Explorer.

[Judas]

i find a low level format a nice thing to do if the machine is a number of years old... just to get every nitty critty little thing sorted for sure

[jrdnthms]

I'm having problems with a reformat, its not letting me reformat from disc