easy Reformatting?

[DurakkenX]

Is there any way to speed up the reformatting and reinstalling of everything? Or preserving certain programs you may not have the disc for?

I prolly have a lot of spyware so if whatever you suggests not having spyware as it will reinstall it prolly would do me no good...



also since i'm asking about these thing anyways...do programs work if they are installed on other HDs other than the one that has the OS installed on it... and if so is there degraded performance? I tried recording with fraps onto a secondary HD and the video was degraded pretty bad...

[Sinue_v2]

This is more a question for Tech Support forum.

No, it doesn't matter what disk your programs are installed from. They'll all run just as fast as if they were on the same HDD as the OS. Well, depending on the speed of the HDD. If your C: is 7500rpm and your D: is 5200, then obviously C will load faster. You'll probably get better preformance, actually, because you'll be on an (ideally) seperate IDE cable. Also, you'll have 1 set of HDD heads reading/writing OS specific data and another set reading/writing program data - allowing your system to read more data in tandem rather than piling everything on C: and having that one set of heads try to read all the information. So yeah, I'd leave the C: as your OS and Page File drive as much as possible, and keep your programs on D:. Honestly, I recommend setting up either a small 10-gig drive or a 10-gig partition JUST FOR the OS, and install everything else to your other drives. That way if you have to scrub your C for any reason - you don't lose the information. And if you want even further protection - you could set up multiple disk drives in a low level RAID array so that even if you have a catastrophic failure of one of your drives, your data should still be secure.

Also, unless your system is 100% completely FUBAR I wouldn't recommend a reinstall. First, get some good anti-virus and anti-spyware apps and run them from safe mode. That should hopefully get rid of any malware and the virues that are reinstalling it/preventing it from being deleted. If your system is unable to boot - you should at least get an option for reverting to the last known good configuration. That should at least buy you enough time in safemode to do some sweeping. If nothing else, put in your windows disk and follow the re-install process. Select your C: partition, and it should detect your installed version of Windows. Don't reformat the partition - it should give you an option of doing a repair install. This should replace any damaged or deleted system files while leaving all of your settings, files, folders, and programs intact.

That is, assuming you're running WinXP SP2 or greater, which you should be.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Sinue_v2 on 2007-08-12 03:22 ]</font>

[DurakkenX]

it's not a matter of spyware/malware, even though Iprolly have a ton i don't know about, it's the slowdown windows gets over time. It's been almost a year since it was last formatted and since i hardly ever shut down it gets a lot of slowdown after time.

[Kent]

I don't know which OS you're using, but Windows Vista was able to completely reformat my disk and reinstall in about 30~45 minutes.

[DurakkenX]

i have winxp pro... it's not a matter of reformatting it's the reinstalling afterwards that takes so long... i need to install PSU, PS7, and several other programs that i'd rather not have to DL again...especially PSU...it took 5 days to get.

[VioletSkye]

If you have a dual layer DVD burner, reinstall Windows/drivers, do the updates and then install a few programs you want to have installed by default (like PS7 and PSU) and make yourself a customized recovery disk. That's what I do for the custom pcs I build for other people. That way you pop in the recovery disk and within 30-40 minutes you have everything reinstalled that you wanted and you don't have to spend the extra time downloading/installing commonly used programs/drivers/updates.

You don't necessarily need a dual layer drive but chances are you would have to spread your recovery DVD over multiple disks to fit in your other programs.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: VioletSkye on 2007-08-12 12:04 ]</font>