OEM reinstall

When you buy a new PC these days from the brand name distributors such Dell or HP/Compaq, Gateway, Micron or IBM, most of the time you get what is called a "system restore" disk. This disk will wipe your existing disk clean and reinstall whatever windows came with the system and all the applications that came with the system. You probably don't get a Microsoft CD of Windows. So this is called an oem reinstall, and is very different than a windows reinstall. It may be very complicated to do a windows reinstall in this instance, because windows does not know about everything on your system and may not get the reinstall correct. You may wind up looking for drivers to get some hardware working again. In any case it will not get any of the extra added "stuff" (promotions and free programs) that OEM suppliers might include with the software. There will definitely be a separate CD if this is the case.

If you buy a "clone PC" from your local neighborhood small PC shop, you will most likely get an original Windows CD. And then you will get one or more CDs which contains the drivers for all the elements added to the PC. In many cases, the Windows install CD can detect the specific hardware and install the appropriate drivers, but not always. In this case you will have to go back to the extra CD to install the driver. Video drivers are notorious for requiring this, especially if you bought the latest and greatest video card.

If you intend on putting business, or important documents on your PC you must learn to practice some practical, as well as safe computing measures. If you are extremely vigilant about keeping your PC clean, you may only need to invest in an image copy program to do backup. This is described here. If you are not very rigorous about this, at least invest in a second disk, and at least move your "My Documents" folder onto this disk. You should install your applications onto this new disk as well. You need to be vigilant when you install applications, because most of them will install into the C:\program files directory, i.e. on the same partition as the OS. You need to repoint the install to the E: drive, or wherever your new disk drive is. In this way you can completely do a "system restore" at any time, and in the worst case, you may just have to reinstall your applications in order to add all those application specific DLLS in the Windows System directory. Don't forget to do the windows update after you do this, and do the virus update as well. Since you just wiped out your anti-virus subscription as well, you might want to think about how to get that back. Is it worth the $15 bucks to keep this stuff someplace. What about your other programs that had "subscribed?"

You should really use one of the image backup techniques discussed here. You won't even need to use the system restore disk if you do this. You will have created your own system restore disk, complete with all your data and settings!! This technique protects against the most common failures, which are disk failures. You can always replace a disk and restore the original image to it, and the PC will work just fine in almost any case. If something on the motherboard fails, you may not actually be able to get the exact same motherboard, so your image reinstall may or may not work. Repairing a motherboard is probably a lost art, since they cost so little compared to the talk of repairing one. And the lifetime on a motherboard is probably measured in months, so you may not be able to find the exact same motherboard 6 months from now. If you want to be extremely vigilant, you should buy a second identical PC in order to have a backup of your hardware that the image can be restored to. At the very least, you should invest in identical PCs in your business so that you can always restore images of business files.

The "simplest" XP reinstall that you can do involves rebooting the original WINXP CD (use home or pro -whichever one you installed). You can use any XP CD, even if it is not your original CD [borrow one from your friends or from work]. After the CD boots (you may have to go into the BIOS to do this), choose the "reinstall" option. [you may also choose the Repair option at this level, but this is a more advanced command line interface, and you will have to know what you are doing here..... Go ahead and look at it and back out if you want. There is a "fixmbr" which may repair a botched MBR, a "chkdsk" which may fix disk problems. And you will need to know your Administrator password!!]. After the next license screen, choose the repair option, via the "R." This will reinstall the Windows files onto your hard disk. Remember of course that if your PC is all updated with latest updates, this reinstall will set you back to the date of the CD, so you will have to go thru all the updating after you are finished. But the important thing is that your original programs will be intact.

There is also a technique called "slipstreaming" by which you can create a CD with updated Windows files. But why bother when you can save an image!!

DELL Restoration on a Dimension 2350

I recently had the opportunity to reinstall WinXP on a Dell Dimension 2350. This reinstall is not straightforward, and involves a lot of steps. They do not provide a single image of the OS and all the installed drivers and applications! The user had an initial installation of WinXP Home on a single partition. She then did an upgrade of WinXP Pro on top of WinXP Home. Since this was a corp licensed version of WinXP Pro, we were unable to get certain things to work in the WinXP Pro, specifically proper operation of AOL. We could not get to the Internet thru the AOL installation, while normal AOL access worked just fine, as did Internet access outside of AOL. We were never able to figure out just how to re enable this access. So we decided to do a complete reinstall of WinXP Home. The steps I took were the following:

1. Using Partition Magic, I created a small 12 GB partition at the end of the disk. I used partition magic to format the partition, and I chose to unhide the partition. I then used Drive Image to copy an image of the WinXP Pro install to this BACKUP partition. I copied two partitions, actually, a Dell special EISA partition, plus the original WinXP Pro partition.

2. I used file and settings transfer wizard to save a lot of user specific stuff. I saved it into the BACKUP partition. Hopefully when I was all done installing WinXP Home, I could run it from there and restore a lot of user specific settings by pointing the FIle and Settings Transfer Wizard to the BACKUP partition.

3. Using Partition Magic again, I carved out a 29 GB XPHOME partition between the XP Pro and the BACKUP partition, in order to install the WinXP Home. As you can see, I was going to do a dual boot install, so as to preserve the original WinXP Pro install. I used partition magic to format the partition, and I asked it to unhide the partition.

4. Initially I was in WinXP Pro, and inserted the WinXP Home CD, and found the setup. I ran this, and it started the setup. I had to enter the Product Key, and select the partition XPHOME I had created. When it restarted it could not find the "hal.dll." Argh. So then I remembered that you should really start the setup by booting the WinXP Home CD. I did this, and started over. Of course there is now a rogue entry in the boot.ini on the original C drive, listing the now bogus WinXP Home. You can remove that by editing the boot.ini file, preferably by using "msconfig.". This time the setup proceeded OK, and I did not have to reenter the key this time [?].

5. After the WinXP Home was successfully installed, I now had to proceed to reinstall all the drivers that were on a separate CD for this specific system. This WinXP Home disk apparently comes with no drivers at all, unlike the retail XP Home disk! By executing the autorun file, the program actually detects your system hardware and specifies the drivers needed. I am guessing maybe it doesn't detect them, it just knows. But now you have to click on each one, extract the file, and run the setup to do each driver install. It is a little tricky, and you may need several attempts to get it correct. And you actually had to go into the device driver window to "update" the ethernet card - and you had to remember where it installed the drivers so you could point to them. I had to install drivers for the ethernet, sound, system, monitor as a minimum. Curiously I don't seem to have to install a driver for the modem? And there is a bunch of other software, mostly Dell specific stuff to install.

6. Now came the fun part. This PC originally had a Linksys WMP11 wireless PCI card. I made the mistake of leaving the card in when the WinXP Home was initially installed. Since the WMP11 drivers are not fully microsoft compliant, there seems to be some problem with the install. I could never get the driver properly installed, and I went thru many attempts at trying to uninstall/reinstall this card. I even went into the registry and tried to clean it up. Impossible task. So I started completely over, and followed the installation instructions for the WMP11 card for a WinXP. This time it installed properly.

7. However, I could not get the card to acquire an IP address from the Linksys router. Finally I assigned a static address and it worked OK. Not sure why it wouldn't do DHCP. Maybe there was an update on windowsupdate?

8. Next, I went to Windowsupdate.microsoft.com and updated all the security fixes, and then all the recommended extra software. About 60 MB of stuff.

9. Then I installed Norton antivirus. Previous registration took OK.

10. Installed Lavasoft ad-aware 6.

11. Installed applications in sequence: AOL, Quicken, Realplayer, Roxio CD, DVD stuff, Wordperfect. Whew.

12. I then used "File and Settings Transfer Wizard" to copy the stuff saved from the WinXP Pro setup to this setup.

13. Finally, I used Drive Image to copy an image of the WinXP Home over the the BACKUP directory. I copied the EISA partition and the WInXP Home partition.

Now wasn't that easy!!!!???

CAVEAT on 2350 install: I had trouble with some Windows update actually breaking the wireless WMP11. So what I decided to do was to completely configure the system using the ethernet controller, save an image to BACKUP, and then do the wireless card configuration. Once I had the wireless configuration working, I would save another configuration to BACKUP.

Upgrade of an HP Laptop

I recently upgraded an HP laptop from NT4 to WinXP pro. Because of the initial configuration of the disk, the upgrade required some special work. The single disk was split into two partitions, corresponding to disks C and D. To upgrade to WinXP, I needed a LOT of room on the C drive, which I did not have. I of course had plenty of space on the D drive, but I also had a lot of files out there, so I couldn't really just move all those applications to the C drive to free up the D drive.

So what I had to do was use partition magic to merge the two partitions together, and create a single C drive. In order to do this, I had to convert the FAT32 partition to NTFS (I could have converted the NTFS to FAT32). And then I found that the cluster sizes were different (normal for FAT32 vs NTFS), so I had to make the cluster sizes the same. I could then merge the two partitions together. I was then able to upgrade the NT4 to WinXP Pro since I had enough space on the C drive now.

TCP/IP STUFF

WIRELESS STUFF

PC STUFF

ADSL/CABLE MODEM STUFF