XP Home to Pro

**Kodiak** · August 22nd, 2005, 10:16 AM

In all my years I have never had to upgrade a system from Xp Home to Pro and in most case I hate to upgrade and would rather format but in this case what is best? The man has nothing he wants to save.

**geoscomp** · August 22nd, 2005, 10:30 AM

Then, in keeping with the usual common wisdom about clean installs being better than upgrades..wipe it and use the xp pro upgrade disk..it'll ask you for the xp home disk as it installs.

**Ferrit** · August 22nd, 2005, 10:40 AM

Agreed clean install is the best and in fact cheeck that the partitions are ntfs

**3fingersalute** · August 22nd, 2005, 10:44 AM

also, double check about the "nothing he wants to save" comment.

I can't believe the amount of people who have told me they don't "need" anything saved, and then call in a panic later when they remember what they really did need.

**Kodiak** · August 22nd, 2005, 05:43 PM

Hehehe. I know I have run across that nothing I want to save before until they find out everything is actually wiped off the drive. I now have a paper for them to sign just for this. This is the second time around for him. His system was wiped and cleaned a week ago and I spoke to him again since he wants me to run all my clean up programs on his wife’s machine and he told me he gave me the wrong disk. He apparently got a Dell and it came with Home and he wanted Pro so he had Dell send him another full OS and he gave me the Home to reinstall. Didn't tell me he wanted pro. Anyway I told him it would be better to wipe it again and install pro and he had no problem with that. I think this will lead to more business in the future so I told him since I would be there doing his wife’s computer I would do his for free. Nice guy huh? Wanted to make sure it wasn't just popping in the disk and a few files copied over and it was done.

**jitBob** · August 23rd, 2005, 09:52 AM

New drive with DSP Xp Pro - old drive as slave drive. All bases covered.

**kato2274** · August 23rd, 2005, 10:25 AM

Originally Posted by 3fingersalute

also, double check about the "nothing he wants to save" comment.

I can't believe the amount of people who have told me they don't "need" anything saved, and then call in a panic later when they remember what they really did need.

one of the best uses for ghost besides deployment. I take an image of every machine I work on for someone and hang onto it for a couple of weeks. then when they say I need blah blah blah, I fire up ghost explorer and extract the files from the image for them.

it also saves me headache when they specifically mention a directory or file to save and it just slips my mind because it's not a standard location like "my documents" or something.

**3fingersalute** · August 23rd, 2005, 11:02 AM

Originally Posted by kato2274

one of the best uses for ghost besides deployment. I take an image of every machine I work on for someone and hang onto it for a couple of weeks. then when they say I need blah blah blah, I fire up ghost explorer and extract the files from the image for them.

it also saves me headache when they specifically mention a directory or file to save and it just slips my mind because it's not a standard location like "my documents" or something.

I do the exact same thing, I have a 250GB USB drive just for archiving images on.

I tell people I hold onto them for 90 days, and if they haven't located anything missing in that time, it must not be that important anyways.

**Kodiak** · August 23rd, 2005, 03:02 PM

Are you imaging there entire drive(s)? It seems like if you work on 3 or 4 PC's a day that could result in a bit more info then 250gig. I would like to learn more about this idea since it would be a great idea to be able to hold it for them for a while anyway since I have had this happen once already. Most folks I have found so far want there docs and email addresses and such but thats about it. The one I had said he wanted me to save his pics in the docs folder so I saved his pics and then after all was said and done he asked where his documents were. I just had to tell him he said pics not docs. I would say 2 weeks to 30 days would be good enough.

**Ferrit** · August 23rd, 2005, 03:11 PM

It doesnt really result in all that much info.
few weeks yer deleting off the earlier images.
And Harddrives are getting very cheap

**Kodiak** · August 23rd, 2005, 05:14 PM

Are you just copying and paisting there entire drive (s) over to the USB drive?

Can you give me a link to a good one to purchase?

**3fingersalute** · August 24th, 2005, 07:30 AM

Personally, I'm using Norton Ghost (as I believe Ferrit is as well), which pulls the entire drive down into a single compressed file. You can use this to then restore the drive later, or use Ghost Explorer to access the image file and simply pull out individual files.

I save mine for 90 days and 250GB is plenty of room (in most cases), but then again, this is all side work for me, so I'm not doing 2-3 pc's a day. I have a coroporate job with totally separate image storage spacefor my users, what I'm talking about here is personal jobs I do. (Maybe 2-3 a week at most). For most home users I've encountered, the image file is under 10GB, and a lot of times under 5GB.

**3fingersalute** · August 24th, 2005, 07:47 AM

Originally Posted by Kodiak

Can you give me a link to a good one to purchase?

I am personally using a Western Digital 250GB USB drive at the moment, looks like its around $246.00 on NewEgg. There are of course cheaper models, or the other option is a USB caddy, which allows you to hook up IDE drives. I have one of these as well, and can swap out drives as needed.

**kato2274** · August 24th, 2005, 08:41 AM

I usually go the network route and use a USB network dongle if the computer doesn't have a NIC then drop the image onto my redhat NAS box I have in the basement with 160GB drive in it. I use a custom windows PE disk with a ton of network card drivers and ghost version 8 on it.

I do the exact same as 3fs, though I do A LOT LESS side jobs than him. they are actually getting to be a bigger pain in the butt for me than they are worth. I do maybe 3 a month or so.

**Kodiak** · August 24th, 2005, 01:11 PM

My business comes mostly from in home repair and most of the time when they call me 75% of them are near dead in the water. Are you doing onsite or in home or your business work and removing the drive from there pc to back it up or is ghost installed and run off the external drive. Never heard that to be possible is why I'm asking. I'm confused here.