RE: Checklist for Reformatting

["Pinkham, Jim" <Jim -dot- Pinkham -at- voith -dot- com>]

Nancy, my personal opinion is that Fred Langa's advice is the gold
standard on this subject. You'll have to tweak the reference below to
your situation, but I've tried it and it's very thorough, and I feel
very comfortable if I ever need to get back to square one :)

http://www.langa.com/backups/backups(1).htm.

Jim 

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+jim -dot- pinkham=voith -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+jim -dot- pinkham=voith -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
Behalf Of Nancy Allison
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 10:13 AM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Checklist for Reformatting

I've just done a web search for "checklist for reformatting hard drive"
and I have not found anything like what I'm looking for.

I work from home and don't have an IT department to rely on. Even after
I run SpyBot, Counterspy, Norton, and AdAware, and even after I did a
partial reinstallation of XP, my computer is still as slow as cold
molasses.

It's time to reformat my hard drive, but despite saving almost
everything to an external HP Personal media drive, I'm scared to death
that I will lose key data. Here's the backup checklist that I've come up
with so far:

1.  Export Contacts, Calendar, and Mail from Outlook, and back up the
exported files.

2.  Export Favorites from IE and back up.

3.  Back up all known data files.

4.  Back up all downloaded executables that I will need to reinstall
software.

>From your collective wisdom (and painful experiences) -- What hidden or
obscure files am I not thinking of?

Honestly, I could not find an existing checklist for personal computers.
If there is one, please point me to it. If there isn't, I'll create one
from what I learn here and send it to anyone who'd like to have it.

Thank you for your help. I am sick to death of having to take a nap
while waiting for a new application to open . . . 

--Nancy
 
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