Need to reinstall Win2k. Problem: what to save?

[Elledan]

Thanks to my old crappy CD-rom drive, I've now an kinda working Win2k system. Reinstalling on top of Win2k (with a new CD-rom drive) has helped a bit, but not enough.

My problem is that I've installed lots of programs on another partition (D so that when I clean install Win2k, I've to reinstall all of those programs to get the settings back or try to live with it.

Is there any way around this? For example by backing up the registry and the user.dat and system.dat files?

All help is appreciated.

 

[todays]

The largest problem you run into with any operating system is trying to do what you are trying to do. You would have to back up the registry. But, all your current problems are probably in the registry. So it's a catch 22. If you know how to remove the problems, you would't have to re-install. Meaning, it's probably faster to get a clean install, then save a copy of the registry, then re-install everything. Once you have it running then back up the current registry and you will have a good copy until you hose it again. I save a clean install registry and one with all my programs loaded. So, yes you're sorta screwed.

 

[Elledan]

That's what I already feared...

And how about those user.dat and system.dat files? They contain some general settings, so they could be backed up and put back after the reinstall, right?

 

[Bluga]

Normally i just save the "Document and Setting" folder

I think that's all you need to restore you favorite folders, etc.

Other won't change much.

 

[Semimaker]

I have to do the exact same thing.

What I did was keep my favorites and wipe everything else.

Then search you drive D for *.reg files and install all of these back into your registry. You may need to re-install some of the applications but that not too bad with a new CD-Rom.

 

[Elledan]

Ok, thanks for all your replies!

I think that I'm ready now to reinstall. Now I've only got to set a date to format the HD... <sigh>