[steelcaress]

Hi! I have what may appear to be a silly question...

I have a computer running a sick and ready-to-die copy of Windows 2000 (a dying video card turned off the computer spontaneously a lot and bit by bit destroyed the OS). I want to put XP on it, but I have no way of backing up my data. That is, I don't have the money to spend on a drive or CD-ROMs to burn it off.

I don't have the hard drive space to move it to a different folder.

Now, I also don't have a working floppy drive, so booting into DOS to rename my Documents & Settings folder might be problematic.

My question: Can I install Windows XP and *not* have the Documents & Settings folder overwritten? In other words, can I install XP and still be able to read my pdfs, docs, use my little tiny freeware programs, etc and not worry about them going away because of a virgin Documents & Settings folder?

If there's a solution I'm missing please let me know.

 

[OldGrayGary]

Hi steelcaress


Your best bet is to run a repair install of Windows 2000 . . . I'm going to assume that if your hardware is in bad shape, it won't run XP well enough for productive use. XP is now up to SP3 ... on PCs with older hardware with less than 384mb of system memory, XP SP3 is just too slow.

For the full details, plus screenshots of each step, windowsreinstall.com has a guide --- http://www.windowsreinstall.com/windows2000/Repair/index.htm --- basically, you press 'R' at the right moment, after booting with your Windows 2000 CD.

A successful repair install should not overwrite any personal data, nor disrupt currently installed programs.

Best of luck
. . . Gary


P.S. ... perhaps for an inexpensive backup, you can borrow a friends external (usually USB) CD burner - and a few disks (CD-Rs are about 10 cents each) & back up in that way. Or try a USB flash-memory drive, the 1gb variety is going for about ten dollars (USD).