Re: reformatting xp

SteveL wrote:
I have been doing this for 20 years, Read my post it states a CLEAN
install. If you have had a virus on your system, LLF the drive.


<snipped>

If that's how you clean viruses then have at it. Personally I think it's a
lot of unnecessary work. As I say I have seen many viruses over the years.
There are some partition table viruses that just deleting and re-creating
the partition won't remove. These are very simple viruses that are easily
removed by all current antivirus products. My concern isn't with your
method. It's up to you how much work you want to do. It's that your warning
that following your advice would erase all partitions on the drive and may
cause data loss was buried in the post and glossed over as "no biggy". Many
if not most of the people reading this newsgroup would not have known this.
If they follow your advice they may lose their data that was on another
partition they wanted to keep. The OP makes mention of 3 partitions over 2
drives and only wanting to delete the system partition.

As an aside, setting up a 3 GB system partition is ludicrous. You could
barely fit XP into it. Next service pack you would be out of luck. If your
intent was to only put the page file in the 3 GB and the system in another
partition then again that is flawed. In most cases this will actually slow
down Windows as the drive has to do longer seeks to read/write the page
file. The only way to speed up page file use is to put the page file on a
different drive that is connected to a different controller. Even then with
the speed of modern drives it's unlikely most users would notice any
performance improvement.

--
Kerry
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User


.

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