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Reformatting Windows XP the RIGHT way
Robert Hallock
October 21, 2008 12:34 PM ET in Tech
Restoring information to Windows
The very first step before migrating data back from the external drive to your new installation of Windows is to log in and out of each account you created. Doing this will generate folders, files and settings that don’t exist until you perform the login the first time.
Next, you’ll want to log into each user account one by one and import the data we previously archived:
- Launch Internet Explorer and restore your bookmarks with the Import and Export Wizard or copy the Favorites folder back to the My Documents. For example, you might copy the favorites folder from the John Doe folder on the external drive back into C:\Documents and Settings\John Doe.
- If you use Firefox, launch the browser once and then close it. Then use the MozBackup utility to restore the profile for each user account. Or, you can go back and restore the profile from the external as described by Mozilla.
- If you manage your mail with Outlook Express, you can restore the mail for each account with the Outlook Express Backup tool or by copying the information back to C:.
- Don’t forget to run the FAST Wizard from each user account. Import the information that you stored for each user to recover all the desktop icons, documents, desktop, and start menu settings. If you had to manually copy the My Documents folders for each user, be sure to move them back to the appropriate folder.
- If you use iTunes, assure that you’ve moved the iTunes library back into place from the external hard drive.
Now we’re going to activate that big partition we created so we can move the remainder of our stored information to it. To do this, launch Windows Explorer and double click on the partition:
Double click on the second partition, as seen here.
Windows will prompt to format the disk for use, to which you should answer yes. Next, Windows will launch the disk formatting utility which you can quickly use to make this space available for use:
Tick the Quick Format check box and press start to format the partition.
Once the format process is finished, this partition is fully capable of storing any information. Finish your data restoration process by moving your miscellaneous data from the external drive to this partition.
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