reformat

[abc71]

want to put old hard drive in brand new system,will i need to reformat the drive,minding the fact i only hav xp upgrade installed over windows me which i dont hav anymore.will it be possible

 

[Buz2b]

You'd probably have to reformat. You might be able to boot to the XP CD and try to reinstall XP over itself but that will be tricky at best. Then there's the question of chipset and other drivers. There is a method detailed in the Anandtech FAQ's for doing something like this. You should take a look around. If nothing else, just borrow a ME or 98 CD from a friend, format the drive and reinstall XP. When it asks you to insert an OS disk (to prove you are eligible for the XP "upgrade") use the borrowed CD. That should work fine.

 

[Delorian]

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, but This site has boot disks for virtually every operating system. You may be able to get a copy of an old boot disk with the fdisk and format commands on them, you will need a floppy to copy to (or cd with nero or so to make a boot cd). Freshly installing XP is not a bad idea either but beware of what it will overwrite and losing all of your old registry settings. I don't recommend reinstalling XP over XP and over ME as this can lead to a lot of instability in the OS.

Hope this helps