[BDaddy]

I just recieved the MCE 2005 OEM version. I have read several forums saying that you need to wipe your PC before you do a fresh install. I guess I need to knopw exactly what wipe your PC means. My Set Up is as follows:


XP Home

AMD 64 3200

512MB Ram

ATI 9600

2X250 Maxtor Hard Drives.


I have currently about 50 DVD's ripped to each hard drive. MY OS is on the drive also. So I don't want to loose those movies. Can someone please explain to me exactly what steps I need to take prior to install. Thanks in advance.

 

[NizZ8]

ick.. how do you have you hard-drive partitioned? Do you have multiple drive letters on those 2x250's or are they in a Raid configuration?

 

[johndaye]

Are your dvd's on the same partition as your os? How much free space do you have on the drives?


JD


EDIT: Must have been typing as Nizz8 was

 

[BDaddy]

My OS is on the C: Drive and it only has 12 Gigs of free space. My second drive shows up as D: and it has 15 Gigs free space. I have movies on both Drives

 

[weldon]

My suggestion would be to take an 80GB drive (or larger, of course) and install that as your primary master and install the OS on that. Leave the 250GB drives for storage. You can delete the old windows directory later to free up more room.

 

[johndaye]

Which I might add might be worth the headache, you can create a new partition in the free space on your C: drive. Then copy over as many dvd's as possible to the new partition, and resize the partition that now has dvd's on it to fill the created free space on C: and then move again, resize again... I've used partition magic to do similar things and while not fun, it works. The more space you can free up on c: the better. Uninstall any unneeded programs, delete unnecessary files & temp folders. If you're comfortable doing it then go into the WINNT directory and (viewing hidden files) delete all the $NTuninstal.. directories.

Once you have all the dvd's moved pop in your MCE disk and install it with the 'fresh' or 'clean' or whatever the non upgrade mode is.


JD

 

[BDaddy]

OK.....So I just purchased a 60GB drive bfrom Staples for only$39........Maxtor 7200RPM. So a little help from the technical experts would be appreciated. What to Do now. Delete what and install what in what order?



A wierd thing I noticed is that on each of my Maxtor 250 HD's......I am only getting 233 GB's of usable space for each.What causes this???

 

[epshih]

Quote:

Originally posted by BDaddy OK.....So I just purchased a 60GB drive bfrom Staples for only$39........Maxtor 7200RPM. So a little help from the technical experts would be appreciated. What to Do now. Delete what and install what in what order?

If you are REALLY new to configuring HDD's, the safest thing to do is

1) remove your existing drives from your computer. Make sure you know which one is which.

2) Jumper your NEW HDD as Cable Select (CS).

3) Connect your NEW HDD to the Primary IDE controller. There are 2 IDE connectors on the IDE ribbon cable. You want to connect your NEW HDD to the connector on the END, not the connector in the middle.

4) Boot your computer and enter the BIOS.

5) go into the BIOS config screen and make sure your new HDD is properly detected...

6) Look at your Bios' BOOT UP SEQUENCE options and make sure your DVD/CD ROM is listed before your HDD. Should be this order... #1. 1.44 Floppy #2. DVD/CDRom, #3. HDD. Save and exit.

7. Pop your MCE2K5 cd and install OS completely.

8. Turn off computer... reconnect your old Drives in whatever config you want. Might be easiest to just reconnect them as they are currently configured. Just connect them AS-IS to your SECONDARY IDE controller... leaving them cabled and jumpered exactly as they were before.

9. Boot into OS and drives should show up with different Drive letters than originally.


10. use XP Disk Management to blow away your OLD OS partition. If you want to expand your old DVD partition into the new unpartition space that was created after the old OS partition was killed, it can't be done inside XP/MCE unless the HDD is converted to a DYNAMIC disk or unless you buy a 3rd party app. It would be easiest to just copy all you data to another drive like your new C or your other 250GB HDD. Then use Disk Management to kill all partitions on the DVD HDD. And then, using , Disk Management, recreate a new partition using the entire HDD. After all that, you can copy your DVDs back and you're done.

Quote:

A wierd thing I noticed is that on each of my Maxtor 250 HD's......I am only getting 233 GB's of usable space for each.What causes this???

That's because you aren't really getting a 250GB HD. 250GB is just marketing hype. Read the fineprint... they are cheating you and it's legal because they disclose, in really tiny print, that they are screwing you. Besides that, NTFS has overhead for stuff like ACLs and other housekeeping stuff, so you're going to lose even more usable space.

 

[epshih]

Oh the otherhand, I don't know why everyone told you to buy a new HDD. Your OS and DATA were on separate partitions to begin with. All you had to do is just install MCE on your C: partition. If you wanted a clean install instead of an upgrade (don't even know if MCE supports upgrade), all you had to do is tell the Installer to install a new copy. It would have blown away your old XP Home install and put on a fresh copy of MCE... leaving your D:, E:, F:, etc... drives and data intact. 10-15GB is more than enough space for an for a XP/MCE boot partition. Anyways, good luck. My copy of MCE2k5 should have arrived. Looking forward to installing it and playing this weekend.