- Install the new drive into the holding case, taking care to mate it with
any plug adapters and lining it up with the same screws used for the
former drive. - Slide the new drive into place and attach it in its bay.
- Return the battery to its slot and reattach the AC adapter.
It is not a good idea to perform a major operation like installing an oper-
ating system using battery power; if you run out of juice before the
install is fully completed, the entire job may fail. - Turn on the laptop and boot the installation program for the new
operating system from the CD drive. - After Windows XP is installed and up and running, reinstall applica-
tions to the new drive.
In most cases you need to do this from the original installation media.
If you are very lucky, all of your old applications work properly with
Windows XP, although some may need to be patched for the new operat-
ing system, and a few might need to be replaced with completely new
versions.- Use the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard to collect the, uh, files and
settings from their storage place.
Installing Windows XP on a blank drive ..........................................
The simplest installation is what is called a clean install, which is either per-
formed on a completely blank new drive, or on an old drive where all data
and the previous operating system have been removed. You don’t need to
manually remove the former data; all that needs be done is to repartition the
disk and reformat it. Of course, before you’ve done that you have backed up
all irreplaceable data to an alternate media — a CD, DVD, Zip disk, a location
on a different machine connected by a network, or another method.The process of partitioning (or repartitioninga previously used disk) is
explained in instruction manuals for your operating system or the hard drive.
You can also find full details on the Microsoft Knowledge Base, reachable
through http://www.microsoft.com. Basically, before you can install an operating
system you must create a primary partition (a defined “look here first” place)
on the first physical hard drive in your system, and then format that parti-
tion. Formattingcreates an indexing system that can be accessed by the
machine to store and retrieve data. When it comes to installing an operating
system on a new or erased disk, there’s a Catch-22: the system needs to boot
itself to life even though the drive is blank. The solution lies in the use of an
appropriate startup disk. They include the following:260 Part V: The Software Side of Life