BACKUP GUIDE FOR NEWBIES


Sooner or later you will turn on your machine and you will discover everything you ever put into it (programs, images, word processing, tax data, your company's books, spreadsheets, your great Canadian novel) is gone. There are several ways this can happen:
Your hard disk failed.
A malicious program or virus erased your hard disk.
You accidentally erased files.
Your computer was stolen.
Your computer was damaged in a fire or flood.
Usually no amount of wailing, gnashing or teeth, or money will bring it back. You have to start all over from scratch. For many people this would be catastrophic. If you are one of these people, I strongly recommend doing monthly backups of your entire hard disk, and all of your data each night, or at least the data that recently changed. If you backup only changed data, restoring takes much longer since you must keep and restore all the intermediate backups as well as the most recent.

This site will give you all the options with how to do it and the pros and cons of each method

http://mindprod.com/bgloss/backup.html#BACKUP


http://mindprod.com/bgloss/backup.html

To save your Behind if you have Win XP read and do this now

What is all this about a boot disk?


You can use a Win98 boot disk. There you have a choice to boot with CD-ROM support. You can use fdisk to delete the DOS and non DOS partitions, create a new primary DOS partition, format in FAT32 ect. Note: If your current hard drive is entierly formatted in NTFS, then fdisk probably won't see it and you need to run scanreg.exe first.


If you REALLY want to make boot disks for WinXP PRO OR HOME go to the following Microsoft site. It will take 6 (yes 6) floppies.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310994


also you can use a Win98 boot disk as suggested above. Use fdisk to blow away an NTFS partition and format. Put in WinXP disk, boot from CD drive go to option to reformat in NTFS and reload OS.
(but I like Fat32 much better)
Good luck


Obtaining Windows XP Setup Boot Disks
The information in this article applies to:
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Microsoft Windows XP Professional


you can download the one you need at this link
This article was previously published under Q310994

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310994