I have a pentium 3 machine that is currently running norton ghost and i am trying to upgrade from windows ME to XP. The problem is that i cant seem to re-formatt the drive and remove norton ghost at the same time as it was part of the preinstalled software. What i am actually after is to put in a clean install of windows xp because when i try to upgrade to xp, the systems keeps crashing and becomes very unstable. My hardware meets all the requirements for the upgrade and it is not the first me i have re-formatted and re-installed an OS. I have also tried to install windows 2000 and have the same problems. I just need a wiped drive and a clean registry if that is possible so that i can upgrade.
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Anyway, you shouldn't bother formatting partitions since windows 2000/XP installer has a partitioning/formatting utility that will definetly be able to erase the partition where Windows ME resided (it won't concern about Ghost in any way, however I don't see how comes that you couldn't format because of Norton ghost ... but this is unimportant).
Ok get a startup disk win 98 preferrably.
Check this out it will help
http://www.techrescue.net/
Download a boot disk from www.bootdisk.com and boot on it
FDISK /mbr
FDISK and remove the partition(s)
recreate the partition(s)
Reboot on the boot disk
FORMAT C:
MD C:\CABS
COPY D:\WIN98\*.* C:\CABS
C:
CD\CABS
SETUP
Explanation:
FDISK /mbr rewrites the boot sector of your hard drive. This is good just in case you may have some boot sector corruption due to virus or some other foe.
Removing the partition(s) is option 3 in FDISK I believe. this guarantees that you will not have any leftovers from the old installation.
Recreating the partitions is option 1. You should be able to only create one partition and make sure you chose large disk support when you started FDISK if you have a drive larger than 2G.
FORMAT C: formats the drive as you already know. There is no need to put /s on it since that will be taken care of by the 98 installation.
You create a CABS directory on your hard drive and put the installation files there for faster and easier installation. It is also quite easier when you need to add hardware or make config changes.
SETUP starts the Win98 installation.
Sounds like you are prepared to loose all your current installed software and settings. In this case can you not install XP as a clean install? You can choose to install XP into another directory e.g. C:\WinXP instead of the default C:\Windows. This is the same as install from scratch.
Try this:
1. Prepare yourself a WinME boot disk. Make sure BIOS is configured to boot from floppy first.
2. Insert boot disk into floppy drive. Start XP installation from ME. Choose clean install and choose a name other than Windows as the installation path. Installation files will be copied to you hard disk. System automatically reboots.
3. Your system should now boot into the WinME DOS prompt. Goto C:\ and type dir and find PROGRA~1 (maybe different in your case), type ren PROGRA~1 oldprog to rename the Program Files directory to oldprog. This is to prevent XP adding files to this directory and it would be pretty hard to clean up old files after XP is installed.
4. Reboot your computer and resume XP installation.
When all is done and you are happy, you can delete the oldprog and Win ME directories.
I think a boot disk from an old win 98 will do the job. Just use fdisk.
But I do not think that it whould be a smart think to upgrade a PIII to win2000 or XP.
The probelm is the motherboard. I have seen many problems with win2000 or XP and old motherboards.
Some times you can not do anything about it.
If you still want to do the upgrade try upgrading the bios to the newest version you can find.
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by: kronostmPosted on 2004-03-03 at 01:02:54ID: 10502824
Try killdisk http://www.killdisk.com/pr