re: Recovered WinXP on very small FAT32 partition
Sunday, August 24, 2008 at 8:37 am
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Richard Harris
(243 messages posted)
Normally product activation on a pre-built PC is tied to the BIOS. Thus, so long
as you do not update the BIOS, or change motherboards, re-installation should cause
re-activation.
As for the recovery partition, that has little/no value, if you have a true recovery
CD/DVD. By this I mean a CD/CD-set/DVD that contains an image of the system partition.
CAUTION: Usually such an image is too big to fit on one CD, even if it excludes
such files as pagefile.sys and hyberfil.sys, which XP will re-create upon booting.
The alternative to a true recovery CD is a CD that only contains recovery software
and acts upon an image of the system partition that is somewhere else, usually on
a hidden partition, such as the one you have now overwritten.
CAUTION: If you do not have a true recovery CD/CD-set/DVD, do NOT attempt the following
!
Given where you are, I would delete all partitions, create a few new ones (at least
two), then let the recovery CD install XP on the first partition. The reason for
at least two paritions is to allow you store personal files on the second partition.
Then, if you ever need to re-install XP, your persoanl file will not be destroyed
as part of that process.
As for FAT32 vs NTFS, I have used both under XP and have found no advantage to NTFS,
unless I am dealing with single files larger than 4 Gig. Then, NTFS is required.
NTFS can be made more secure than FAT32, but true security involves physically guarding
the PC more than fancy software. NTFS is suposed to be more reliable and/or self-healing
(via CHKDSK), but in practice I have had as many problems with NTFS partitions as
with FAT32 partitions. FAT32 is easier to read/write outside of XP, in cases where
XP won't boot even into safe mode.
With respect to the future, get some reliable (non-Microsoft) backup/restore software
and do occassional backups of the operating system partition to somewhere off of
the PC, such as an external USB disk, CDs/DVDs, etc. I use Acronis TrueImage, but
the latest Norton GHOST has similar capabilities to restore from outside of XP and
from external USB drives. Other options, some free, can be found at:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads3.html
On Sunday, August 24, 2008 at 5:29 am, Lorna wrote:
>Hi, thanks very much for your help. I was a bit wary about re-formatting as I'm
>worried about product activation. However, I noticed no choices during the recovery
>process that allowed me to determine which partition to install in. Is there a way
>to make sure it gets into the right one!? Once again, thanks for your help! Lorna.
>
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