How to best clean up all hard drives & re-install XP

[itsme213]

I have a PC with a 40G drive and a 160G drive, with multiple OS installations (one Win-98, 1 XP-Home on one drive, on XP-Pro on the other drive) and some empty partition space. The machine also has many years of crud accumulated.

I want to wipe out / re-format both drives (after backing up data), do maximal drive clean-up (analysis? bad-sector blocking? others??), and re-install Win-XP Home on it.

All I currently have is the Win-XP Home Dell recovery CD.

What else do I need? How do I go about doing this?

Also, the Win-XP Home CD is old, and I previously needed to update the drivers etc. manually to fix strange hardware-ish glitches, and do all the MS-upgrades, both very slow and painful processes. Is there a smart way to avoid repeating these e.g. something like a Ghost-image? All suggestions welcome.

Thanks!

Sophi.

 

[wolluf]

Use the Dell recovery CD to restore whichever disk you want as system disk to factory condition. Log on with other disk connected, and simply format it (quick format will do) - right click on it in explorer & select format or run diskmgmt.msc & do it from there.

Install SP2 and then go to windows update for the rest of the patches. If necessary, visit Dell site for latest versions of drivers. Download & install as required. Reinstall software. Then when you're happy its all just so, you can make an image using something like Ghost or True Image, so you always restore to this point.