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Posted
on October 12, 2001 by Thomas
McGuire
Check for Operating
Systems or General Software
prices here.
 Installing
a Microsoft Operating System is a relatively easy procedure for many, although
for most others it seems like a fairly daunting task. This guide will take you
through the Pre-Installation, Installation & Post Installation steps for
Microsoft Windows Operating Systems & through such other procedures as
installing Drivers for Hardware, or other system updates.
If
you intend to Dual Boot your system then please check out
our Dual
Boot Guide instead, although you may well find some
sections of the guide to be of great use as well, e.g.
Driver installing/updating.
Requirements
Before
you go about installing Windows on a new system, or as will
be the case for many of you, consider reinstalling Windows
on your current system you should ensure you have the
following available;
-
Windows
98/Me or Windows 2000 CD’s. As you can guess you'll
require these to install your Operating System. NOTE -
This guide is based on retail versions of Windows, not
versions (Which may install extra components or differ
slightly during installation) bundled with manufacturer
PCs, e.g. Dell.
-
Startup
Disks. Depending on the Operating System you intend to
install you should have an appropriate Boot disk for it.
This will be covered in the next section.
You'll
also need to have the Serial numbers for your Operating
System available, these should be located on the CD
cases/holders that the Windows CD is contained in, or if you
bought a Manufacturers machine they should be on a User
License booklet that came with your PC.
Pre-Installation
These
following few sections will cover some basic preparation
before you begin Operating System installation.
Startup disks
Startup
Disks are becoming less of a necessity in recent times given
the move away from DOS, & the ability of most Operating
System's CDs to be used as Bootable media. That said, its
still a good idea to have Boot disks available to cover any
potential problems that may unexpectedly arise. To create a
Boot disk use the following procedures;
Windows
98/Me
Insert
a formatted Floppy disk into your Disk drive. Click on Start,
Settings, Control Panel. Open Add/Remove
Programs & select the Startup Disk tab.
Select the Create Disk button to make your Startup
Disk.
Windows
2000
To
create a Boot disk in Windows 2000 requires 4 Floppy disks,
once these are available insert a Floppy disk into your Disk
drive (For convenience sake you should label these disk
numerically in the order they are inserted, i.e. 1, 2, 3
& 4). Ensure you have inserted the Windows 2000 CD in
your CD\DVD drive also. Open My Computer & open
the CD\DVD drive where the Windows 2000 CD is located. On
the CD enter the BOOTDISK folder & execute
(click) the MAKEBOOT.EXE file & follow the
prompts as instructed.
You
can find other Boot disks over on BootDisk.com
in case you want a different one for some reason (They offer
some customized disks for more advanced users).
As
mentioned earlier though, most systems support booting from
the CD\DVD drive now so Bootable disks should be considered
only as a secondary method, besides booting from your
Operating System CD is faster than loading from Floppy
disks.
Backup
This
only really applies if you are intending to install Windows
on a system which already has a Windows Operating System
installed, i.e. Formatting the installation partition then
installing Windows again.
Depending
on the backup devices available, you may be limited in what
you can backup & how you can back it up. If you have
multiple partitions or multiple Hard drives then this
shouldn't be too hard. NOTE - Before moving data to another
partition ensure it uses a file system that the Windows
version you are going to install can read, e.g. If you are
going to install Windows 98 then backing up data to an NTFS
partition will make that data inaccessible. Some other
backup options you may be able to avail of would be
Floppy/Zip disks, CDR/CD-RWs & of course FTP space.
Ensure
that you at least backup any passwords & such that you will
need after installation, e.g. Login/Phone number details
needed to reconnect to your ISP. If possible it would also
be a good idea to download as much other updates as you can,
particularly Driver & Chipset updates. You can find a
listing of such updates on OS
Updates & our Driver
pages (Later on we'll go into details about installing
these).
Once
you have backed up all relevant data then you can move onto
the next step. NOTE - Please remember the process of
re-partitioning & re-formatting your hard drive will
permanently delete all data. Do
not
proceed until you have backed up everything you may need.
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