Reformatting

SoonerMan

Ok, so I'm biting the bullet and reformatting to hopefully fix some USB drives that only seem to recognize things connected to them after a certain point.

My question goes back to something I heard a while ago. I heard if you have things saved in My Documents, during the reformatting they're left untouched. Now this would be great so I don't have to put a shit load of pictures and music on CDs, but I need to know if this is true?

Also, I have the SP1 CD for Windows XP, and I'm on a "DSL" connection but would rather just wait until I got an SP2 CD. Does Windows offer these for people that have SP1 installation cds?

taliosfalcon

If your reformatting, everything is gone, it doesn't matter where it is.

DrFrylock

A lot of people use "reformat" incorrectly when they mean variants of "reinstall Windows."

Reformatting, for real, usually means actually reformatting (and often repartitioning) your hard drive. When you do this, everything on your hard drive goes away. Absolutely everything. You're starting from zero. If you have any files you want to keep, you need to put them somewhere else.

Things in My Documents are preserved between things like repair installs of Windows or upgrades from one Windows version to another.

Also, My Documents is a magic folder and contains a number of its own magic folders (such as My Pictures) that might get slightly borked if you copy them off onto an external drive, reformat, and just copy them directly back. I'm not sure about that 100% though.

SoonerMan

So anything on the SP2 CD?

DrFrylock

What do you mean you have an "SP1 CD" for Windows XP? You could mean 1) that you have a CD that has Windows XP SP1 on it and if you install it fresh you get an XP-SP1 machine, or 2) that you have a CD that has the SP1 installer on it, and you have to install XP (no SP) first and then install SP1 on top of that.

It's semi-dangerous to install XP pre SP2 on any machine on the Internet - even for a couple minutes while you go download SP2 - without having a hardware firewall between you and the Internet, because of random exploits running out there. What you probably want to do is download the standalone installer for SP2, burn it onto a CD, install XP without connecting to the Internet, and then install SP2, then connect to the Internet. Or just do it behind a hardware firewall.

I'm not sure if Microsoft has manufactured XP+SP2 CDs, where SP2 is "slipstreamed" into the ordinary XP disc. If they have, you may be able to get one from MS.

SoonerMan

The last thing you said is what I'm looking for. I thought I saw somewhere I could have ordered one, stupidly I didn't.