If you're doing a clean install (ie, either formatting drive or removing and recreating 
existing partition), then you will need to backup or you'll lose all your data. How 
you backup depends on what you've got. If you have an external drive or CD/DVD writer 
and the machine is running well enough to use the o/s - then either copy your files 
to external drive (or USB stick if big enough) or CD/DVD. If you have no backup devices 
(or can't boot), you either need to buy one or connect your hard drive to another 
machine, and save your files there.

You could install into existing partition - into different folder - ie, not winnt 
(depending how much space) - which would not remove your files (though backup is 
still desirable if possible). Also this would leave existing 'installation' still 
on the drive, which could cause future complications.







On Monday, February 25, 2008 at 4:00 pm, rick wrote:

>thanks kiwi and dex for the good advice, another ?, if you don't mind;how do i save 

>the data on the hard drive(my stuff), or do i need to, before i reinstall the 2000?thanks 

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