Installing XP
A Personal View.
The best method is installing to a blank hard drive. I am not a fan of the upgrade method. Neither am I a fan of partitioning. Partitioning with Fdisk often leads to problems. If you must partition, do it after the installation using Partition Magic. Clean and simple is best. Providing you keep a good current backup of your data, reinstallation gives you a fresh start without the baggage of the previous installation and addons. It may be slower than ghost images and their ilk but I prefer it.
Make sure you have a current backup of all your precious data. My Documents; Downloads; Data created by other programs, eg Quicken, MYOB, any Diary, email messages and account details, address book, and so on. You will also need all the drivers for your hardware and motherboard as well as the originals of your software.
Have all your hardware installed on the motherboard eg. modem, network card, video card, sound card, so that the installation process will do its best to install appropriate drivers from the XP disc.
Format your drive to Fat 32 without naming the partition.
Turn on the Computer and hold down the Delete key to enter the BIOS settings.
If you need information about BIOS setting, try http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/bios/set/.
Set it to boot from either a floppy or the CDROM depending on your installation CD. Turn off the virus checker in the BIOS (Turn it on again after installation). Set any other items as necessary.
Boot the machine and start the XP setup. The setup will re-format the drive, which is OK.
Read the screens. If you really stuffup you can always go back to the Format stage and do it all again.
Choose the Fat32 option when it is offered. The NTFS is OK but if you need to reinstall at a later date it makes things more difficult.
Simplest is to not have a password for the Administrator or the user you create with equivalent rights. Just have one user for a start, say named with your preferred name eg for me it’s Ross with no password. You can add or change this later. Never remove the Administrator user.
Once the installation is complete and XP is running, shut the PC down. Re-boot the PC with the Delete key down and reset the BIOS to boot only from the hard disc and turn on the virus checker. Save the settings and re-boot.
Now is the time to check the device manager for items not working properly. Only install those devices from the motherboard driver disc which are giving trouble. Late model motherboards with on-board video, sound and perhaps LAN probably will need the specialised drivers. If a device is working well with normal functionality without installing the driver on the motherboard disc leave it alone.
Ensure all is apparently working well. If you wish to partition the disc, do it now, ideally using Partition Magic. Reinstate you data from your backup CD. Install your software.