[SRX660]

It seems you don't backup your computer from what you are saying. I am a proponent of backups simply because i lost quite a lot of data and programs many years ago. I decided then to never lose anything anymore. So i learned to back first to floppys ( yes i have 100's of floppys), then to CD's when CD burners came out. I now burn backups to DVD's. I have tried using second internal hard drives, external hard drives, Flash drives, even tapes, and i find the best for long term storage is the CD's and DVD's. For short term hard drives are good but at any given moment a hard drive can go bad. I have already had this happen to me , so i still do long term backups to cd/dvd's.

Yes, you can backup your data by copying the whole folders from one drive to the second ( or external)drive. I do this when people bring me computers that are somewhat borked and need the OS to be reinstalled to work properly. I right click on my computer, then click explore to open up a double pane window. It is thru this window that i drag and drop whole folders to a second hard drive. It takes some minutes to copy large folders but its the easist method i know of. Copy and Paste does the same thing, just a couple more steps to the process is added because you have to go up and click on copy and then open up the other drive and go up and click paste.

Like you, i have had some problems installing XP as a upgrade to a older system on some computers. That is why i suggest doing a backup of any data you want to save and then do a clean install of XP. A clean install will give you the best computer with the least amount of problems. Adding a external HD later will give you your data back to the computer. Yes, i would remove the second HD before you install XP.

If you are going to clean install XP you might as well just format the drive as NTFS and be done with it. XP will still see the FAT32 external drive and you will still be able to access the files on it. Later you can convert that drive to NTFS also in computer management in XP.

SRX660

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First off Gcmom7, sorry I didn't reply back to your question. I did get your Private Messages but SRX660 had already answered your other question with good advise. As SRX660 stated winxp setup will tell you that there is another Operating System installed on the hard drive, which is your current Windows 98SE. As long as you make sure to choose an Upgrade install and not a Full install, winxp setup will only replace your old win 98se system files with new WinXP system files and it "should" keep all your programs and personal files. But one thing with your old programs as I think SRX660 stated they may not run correctly or at all on WinXP and the fact that your hard drive will still be formatted as FAT32 which isn't as good as the new NTFS that WinXP uses. Just doing an upgrade should technically work but personally I would not trust it. And instead like you asked about, just buy an External hard drive that is atleast as big as your current hard drive or preferrably bigger and just connect it to your pc and just copy your whole C: (current hard drive) to the external hard drive, unless you know exactly what files you want to save then you could just copy those particular files to the external drive. Once you copy all your files you want to keep to your external drive, boot from the winxp cd again and run setup and choose a clean install and choose to format the current partition to NTFS. (not NTFS Quick). your may have to delete the current partition and create a new one (just accept the default size winxp suggests which is usually the whole hard drive). then format (NTFS) the new partition. then after format just go through the setup, its all self explanatory.

good luck

[ViprXX]

First off Gcmom7, sorry I didn't reply back to your question. I did get your Private Messages but SRX660 had already answered your other question with good advise. As SRX660 stated winxp setup will tell you that there is another Operating System installed on the hard drive, which is your current Windows 98SE. As long as you make sure to choose an Upgrade install and not a Full install, winxp setup will only replace your old win 98se system files with new WinXP system files and it "should" keep all your programs and personal files. But one thing with your old programs as I think SRX660 stated they may not run correctly or at all on WinXP and the fact that your hard drive will still be formatted as FAT32 which isn't as good as the new NTFS that WinXP uses. Just doing an upgrade should technically work but personally I would not trust it. And instead like you asked about, just buy an External hard drive that is atleast as big as your current hard drive or preferrably bigger and just connect it to your pc and just copy your whole C: (current hard drive) to the external hard drive, unless you know exactly what files you want to save then you could just copy those particular files to the external drive. Once you copy all your files you want to keep to your external drive, boot from the winxp cd again and run setup and choose a clean install and choose to format the current partition to NTFS. (not NTFS Quick). your may have to delete the current partition and create a new one (just accept the default size winxp suggests which is usually the whole hard drive). then format (NTFS) the new partition. then after format just go through the setup, its all self explanatory.

good luck