how to backup/reinstall winxp

  • Thread starter Thread starter Miguel De Anda
  • Start date Start date
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Miguel De Anda

I need to reinstall Windows XP (Its not as perfect as ppl are led to
believe). Will I need to get another activation key? How do I do that? Is
there a way to make a backup of my hard drive onto cd or dvd so that I can
just put it back later without having to go through the activation process
again? (I'm not trying to cheat M$ of my money, just want to save time and
trouble). I've tried using Norton Ghost PE but it doesn't work with WinXP. I
used to use that on my win98.

Also, what if I were to buy a new hard drive? Will I also need to buy extra
software just to move winxp to the new hard drive? How is this supposed to
work?

Thanks.
 
Miguel, if you need to reinstall xp then just reinstall
it. You will, of course, need to reactivate it, but that
should be no more painful than the first time you
activated xp over the internet. May i suggest that, if
you have loads of rubbish on your system, you reformat
the drive during installation so that you start with a
clean drive.
Backup applications can be used to save you installation
time, but as you have found out from Ghost PE, you really
need the latest versions of the software that support xp.
However, while 'imaging' the drive is perfectly
satisfactory, i am a little dubious about what might
happen if you decide to reformat your hard drive and then
reinstall the image. Creating an image file is actually
two fold. The first part enables you to quickly copy the
image to the hard drive, thus preventing a lengthy
install and, secondly, perhaps even more importantly, the
data file containing the activation information is imaged
at the same time, thus, theoretcally, preventing the need
to reactivate. However should the drive be reformatted
the allocated drive number changes and, as i have never
imaged my drive and tried it, will the activation code
ignore the new drive number or, as i suspect, refuse to
accept it.
A new drive brings a new element into the equation,
simply because the hard drive is just one of the
components recorded during the activation process. I
recently changed my hard drive and installed xp on it
using the xp cd, i.e a normal install rather than an
image/copy. When it came to activating, which,
incidentally, i never do until the system has been
running ok for 14 days or so (remember you have 30 days
to activate, the online activation informed me that the
xp product number was being used on another pc. This i
expected because i had changed the hard drive. All that
was needed was a free phone call to Microsoft Activation
to explain that i had changed the hard drive and removed
the copy of xp from the old one. A new activation code is
then given and you are activated. A little inconvenient i
admit, but no big deal.

Hope this helps

John Barnett - MVP
Associate Expert
 
John Barnett - MVP said:
Miguel, if you need to reinstall xp then just reinstall
it. You will, of course, need to reactivate it, but that
should be no more painful than the first time you
activated xp over the internet. May i suggest that, if
you have loads of rubbish on your system, you reformat
the drive during installation so that you start with a
clean drive.
Click to expand...
<snip>

Thanks. I was mostly concerned with the activation part of it. I wasn't sure
how much trouble it would be.
 
Miguel said:
I need to reinstall Windows XP (Its not as perfect as ppl are led to
believe). Will I need to get another activation key?
Click to expand...

No you won't unless you have changed a lot of hardware.

initially I recommend doing a repair reinstall - Set the BIOS to boot CD
before Hard disk, then boot the XP CD, start Setup (do not take
'Repair' at this stage), then after the license agreement take 'Repair
Installation'. This will retain your existing software installations
and most settings. But Updates will have to be run again, especially
SP1; and if you have drivers that only arrived with that, like USB 2
ones, you will need to update drivers for the devices concerned. You
may find that things like virtual memory settings and some aspects of
appearance have reverted to defaults

This should retain your activation status, though if you have never
registered you may have the setup suggest it now (don't bother).

If you *do* do a full format and reinstall, then you will have to
activate again, but you may find it will go through on the net anyway -
if more than 120 days since you last did it certainly will. It is only
if you have made a lot of hardware changes, so that the reformat pushes
things over the top, that you will have to phone a toll-free number
that will be given, to explain and swap one long number for another to
check back as you type it in
 
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