disk wipe

In the worst cases of Windows problems, it is best to wipe the disk clean and then reinstall Windows. In this case you must also reinstall all your applications. None of your data is saved either, so it is a last desperate measure.

This should only be done after you have attempted the other techniques discussed here.

If you find it necessary to completely start over, you should consider installing a second hard disk in your system and start using this for all your data and documents, before you do the disk wipe if you can, otherwise after your reinstall. Change the location of "My Documents" to the E: drive, for instance (assuming d: is a CDROM). This is also discussed here. Try to consciously put data and new applications onto the E: drive. There is often a choice during the program install, and you can put the application on other than C:\program files. In this manner you can wipe and reinstall the OS on the C: drive, and actually have a chance that some applications exist and work after the Windows reinstall. Normally, many programs will have dlls that will have to get reinstalled in the Windows system directory (via reinstalling the program), however, so there are many exceptions. But if you save data on the E: drive, at least you won't lose your data on a clean reinstall. This is the normal procedure for UNIX system and more complex LAN environments - you just put portions of your data on separate partitions. The user's data may even be remotely mounted, and all the workstations look identical from the standpoint of the OS. It is possible to do this with Windows installations as well.

Disk drives must have "partitions," which are much like "drawers" in your disk drive. Partitions must be created by special utilities, which often come with the new disk drive you buy, or more generally, on a DOS boot disk, via the "fdisk" command. Another way is to use Linux/boot Knoppix utility.

If you are considering using an imaging program as a backup technique, then there is an advantage to putting all of your OS and apps and data on a single partition. read on....

For simple home Windows installations, the default is a single partition, which contain both the Windows OS and all the applications and data you ever put on your PC. So when you have to go and reinstall a clean OS using traditional techniques, you have a big problem, because all your data and applications are on that same partition that you need to wipe clean. On the other hand, the simple organization of a single partition makes the use of the image backup utilities very easy! So the single partition install is not such a bad idea if you use one of these image backup tools. Just be sure to practice safe computing so that you are not backing up all the viruses and spyware!

First you need the Win98 startup disk. See www.boot.disk.com for some help on this. Boot this, and run fdisk - delete logical drives, and then delete partitions. You can then recreate the partitions as you choose fit. Now insert the Win98 CDROM, and go to the CDROM drive (CD to E: for example) and run the setup. This will install Windows. If this is an upgrade CDROM, it will ask for some evidence that you really possess the original CD or floppy, so be careful. www.fdisk.com will contain a lot of good info on using fdisk. Of course there are other fancier tools you can use, such as partition magic, but fdisk is the universal Windows tool. Beware that fdisk will only allow one bootable partition. Also be careful of mixing in the Win95 startup disk if you are working on Win98 and later disks. There are problems there. To perform dual/multiple boots, you will have to use the tool provided with the Linux install, or the Knoppix utilities, e.g. And be sure to install the Windows OS first! Linux knows how to work around Windows. Windows, at least the early versions, in general, could care less about other OS's. Nice, huh....?

If you are reinstalling Win2K or WinXP, there is much more capability built into the install procedures to select/format partitions, so you can do this right from the OS install without having to run the Win98 startup disk. There are times however, when you may have to back all the way out to DOS fdisk/Knoppix fdisk and wipe out the partitions, and recreate them!

If you have an OEM system restore disk instead of an original Windows disk, which most new PCs seems to come with these days, then just boot the restore disk and follow the directions. There may be a lot of options here, try to find the one which completely wipes your disk and reinstalls the OS and applications you originally received on the PC. There may even be some options which just reinstall Windows, or the applications, the drivers, etc. So there may be many options. But the only sure fire way to recover your original performance is to wipe the disk clean and start over. See this page for some more info.

WARNING!! EARLY 2005: Microsoft has removed the automatic reactivation of OEM versions of Windows XP when you do a reinstall. Ugh!!! This is apparently because too many people were figuring out how to steal the OEM keys, or some other reason. See this for example. There is a little trick you should use to save your key before you reinstall to bypass this pain. It involves saving a single file "wpa.dbl" and reinserting it after a reinstall [do a search for the file].

This page discusses a Dell Dimension reinstall I recently performed, and the steps necessary.

This article steps thru this Windows reinstall process.

If you find it absolutely impossible to get your OS back, and you have important stuff out there, there are disk recovery services which specialize in this. Here is one:

SalvageData provides hard disk drive data recovery service and computer hard drive recovery and RAID server data recovery.

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