Want to reinstall Xp...

Never done it before. I have a 320 gig external hard drive, so i can back up whatever i need. But for re-installing XP, i've seen video of people deleting partions to do it, and people just inserting the CD and reinstalling it that way. Is there a difference? Any reccomended guides?

Any tips would be greatly appreciated, since I'm a noob.

It's usually pretty straight-forward; just pop in the CD and follow the prompts (as long as you know how to set your system to boot to a CD, anyway).

The biggest piece of advice I can give you is that, if you don't have the original driver CD anymore, make sure you download at least your network adapter's driver from the manufacturer's website, test it before reformatting, and save it to your external drive. It's a helluvalot easier to find drivers for everything else when you've at least got your network connection up and running.

(Personally, I keep a copy of all the drivers handy on a secondary internal drive, just in case a reinstallation becomes necessary due to a virus or failed primary drive.)

You also probably want to take inventory of every piece of software that you use regularly and have installed on your system currently.

And if you copy your entire CoH install directory to your external drive, the program can be quickly reinstalled by a) running the CoHupdater.exe application from the external drive and giving it an install location (usually C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\), b) cancelling the download, c) deleting the info from the install folder on the C: drive, and d) copying everything from your existing CoH installation on your external drive to that location on the C: drive.

Edit:
An afterthought... If your current hard drive is over 3 years old, and you've got the budget for it, I'd suggest replacing it. You can find 500GB drives for under $50 these days.

Pulling the old hard drive out guarantees that you don't accidentally lose any of the files on it, as you can open up the system, plug it in and transfer data directly to the new drive whenever you need to.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

Thanks Chad! I have found a program called Drivermax that is supposedly great for grabbing all your drivers and storing them for easy access later. I'll check and make sure it gets the network drivers as well.

I backed up the entire hard drive last night, so I should have everything I need. I mainly use this rig solely for CoH and light web surfing, so it shouldn't be too terrible.

When I reun coh from the external drive, will it give me a prompt to install to a different directory or is there something i need to do.

*Edit* NVM got it going now. Thanks for the assists, worked like a charm!