This is the first segment of a three part tutorial on a way to safely format and reinstall Windows XP.  A great was to extend the life of your computer is to format and reinstall the operating system.  This guide is made for anyone looking to start fresh with a clean install of Windows XP Home, Professional or Media Center.  I will take into consideration as many “what ifs” as possible so bear with me.  There are many ways to go about a format and reinstall, nuke and pave, whatever you want to call it…  Some are better than my way, some are worse and some may be the same.  Just find what works for you.

I. Data Backup

A. Current Hard Drive is working with no viruses

Transfer all data that you wish to keep to an external source such as an external hard drive, flash drive, CD or DVD.

Determine which external source will work best for you.  Take into consideration the total file size of everything you wish to back up.  For instance, if you have 42 GB of mp3s stored on the same drive that you will be formatting for your Windows installation, then your best bet with be an external hard drive instead of using 10+DVDs.

I like to use a program called Unstoppable Copier.  It’s a great way to make sure you don’t miss a thing if you are going a lot of information and you can tweak some of the settings to save time.  I like to open multiple instances of Unstoppable so that I can copy just the folders I need and skip the mostly useless and possibly harmful temp files located throughout all the hidden folders.

Windows XP uses a Documents and Settings folder located within the root directory of the Windows installation to organize each Windows User’s personal files and settings ex: C:/Documents and Setting/(Your Name).  Within each User folder remains a Desktop, Documents, Favorites folder.  These three folders generally contain the bulk of what you are going to want to back up.

Drill down into your User directory and determine which User Directory contains the data that you would like to back up and copy it to your external source.  If you have multiple user accounts, remember to back up each user account to the external source.  If the other accounts are administrator accounts, you must be in an administrative account to take ownership of the other user’s folders and files before copying them over.  Microsoft has a great guide on how to go about taken ownership of another user’s directory here.

When copying the files to the new source.  I like to maintain the same tree structure of the current directory to avoid confusion later.  On my external hard drive, I would create a folder with my ‘Client Data’ directory that described my current client (Ted Jones).  So if he has a user account named Ted, the path to the external drive would be ‘E:/Client Data/Mr. Jones/Documents and Settings/Ted’.  Then I could simply drag and drop, or use Unstoppable Copier to transfer the Desktop, Documents and Favorites folder into the newly created directory. If I were to open ‘C:/Documents and Settings’ and see that there were two user accounts, Ted and Nancy, then my external drive would have to reflect the second user account, Nancy, at the same level as Ted.  Once again, this is my way, if you know of a better way for you then by all means use it.

- There are also hidden folders located in each user folder.  These folders will need to be shown to retrieve Outlook emails, contacts and other information.

Show Hidden Files

• Open Windows Explorer (Start > My Computer)
• Click on Tools > Folder Options
• Select the View Tab and click on the radio button next to “Show hidden files and folders”

Outlook Express and Outlook Backup

There are so many other great guides out there on how to back up Outlook Express or Outlook that it seems to redundant

Here is a great guide on how to back up Outlook Express and Outlook 2000, 2003 and 2007 information and settings.

I noticed that they left out the .nk2 file which contains all the autocomplete information so here is a guide on how to locate it.  And while we are on the topic of the .nk2 file.  I found a great program made for editing such a file.  This is for everyone who ever misspelled an email address in Outlook and can’t stand seeing it everything they go to write an email to that address.

Other Files

There may be software on the computer that utilizes a database folder or file that isn’t located in the Docs and Settings directory.  Be sure that you are aware of any type of software that stores this information and determine the best way to back it up.  Quickbooks is a popular program that does this.  It normally stores it’s database in the All Users folder under Intuit.  For anyone looking for a video tutorial, click here to see what google videos has to say.

Belarc Advisor is a great free program that analyzes your computer and produces a detailed list of everything pertaining to your Windows XP installation.

If you are just looking to find important serial key information such as your Windows XP key or Office key, use Keyfinder.

B. Current Hard Drive does not boot Windows

You can’t boot into Windows for some reason.  The hard drive may be failing or the viruses have taken over.  Either way, you have to pull that guy out and hook it up to another computer to extract the data.  I’m not going to go into how to perform a diagnostic for these sort of issues.  We’ll save that for another day.

a. Failing Hard Drive

1. Connect the drive to another computer and see if you can open the drive using Windows Explorer.  Use the method above to transfer the data to another mass storage device such as a local hard drive (fastest), external hard drive, usb thumb drive, etc.
2. If the drive isn’t recognized, run data recovery software to see if the computer can recognize any partition on the hard drive and recovery any data located on the drive.  I like to use Data Recovery Wizard.
3. If you still can’t see the data after using regular software based data recovery methods and you really want that information, you can always ship it off to a clean room.

b. Viruses Preventing Successful Windows XP Operation

This is where things can get a little tricky.  The goal is to extract the information that you want while leaving behind the viruses, malware, spyware, etc.  I’ll go over a few steps that can save you the headache of reinfecting your new installation.

1. If the computer you are using to pull the data off the hard drive is a Windows based PC, then I suggest booting into safe mode to prevent any files from running on their own.  Then scan the infected drive with antivirus software such as AVG.  You can download it for free.  I really like to run another scan using Malwarebytes and even SuperAntiSpyware.
2. After the drive has been scanned and any found files removed, you can copy the important information to a good source.