Replacing XP with Win98SE (PII, 233Mhz)

Barry,

It might depend on whether XP is installed on an NTFS partition or an FAT32 partition. The FAT32 partition can be reused after a format, the NTFS partition needs to be replaced. Fdisk /status (from a Windows 98 boot diskette will tell you so).

The general steps:
- make an inventory of the hardware (with Belarc for example, free download from www.belarc.com/free_download.html) and get all needed Windows 98 drivers from Dell website
- burn a CD with a firewall program
- make a Windows 98 boot diskette (run a program you can download from www.bootdisk.com, choose the right one) and boot from it
- fdisk to make a FAT32 partition, if necessary
- format
- install Windows from CD
- install all drivers
- install firewall from CD
- install antivirus (if from CD)
- visit Windows update for all security patches and IE6.0
- install antivirus (if downloaded from Internet)
- install applications

Toni Hackler will come by with much more detailed instruction (she's the specialist on this subject), but you can start with the first 3 points already.

Hope this helps.


Kees

Barry,

Just in case Peter's excellent suggestion doesn't work, here's a link to one of Toni's help posts: http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-6618-0.html?forumID=6&threadID=59251&messageID=1131909&tag=

If you're not sure of the drivers, you can try to contact Dell to see if they can send you a copy of the original restore CD for this machine.

Kees

Windows probably by itself eats that 64 mb ram.Woryy more about more ram man.

because XP was put on with NTFS, you can get a great program called Delpart.exe from the following site:

LOCATION OF DELPART.EXE

http://www.bootdisk.com in the Utilities area or HERE
http://www.pcwarfare.com/hdd.tools.htm
Extract the file to a floppy disk, boot up with your windows bootdisk, change to this floppy disk and run Delpart.exe and you can remove all partitioning.