Good day

I am a teacher living in Cape Town, South Africa. As a Biology/Life Sciences teacher, I spend a lot of time on the internet when preparing lessons and also download many video clips for use as part of these lessons.

My PC knowledge is rather basic - I am comfortable using MS Office and other applications but have very little know-how when things become more technical than just using an application.

i have an HP PC with the following specs:
Intel Core Duo T2400 @ 1.83GHz
2GB RAM
85 GB hard drive
CD/DVD Combo drive
Windows XP Home Edition with SP3

I purchased my PC with XP Home and some apps pre-installed - I have no discs at all. A portion of the hard drive has been partitioned (hope that's the correct term) so that it forms another drive (drive D) which serves as the recovery drive to re-install XP and the preloaded apps when things go horribly wrong.

Murphy's law dictates that there will come a time (and there have been a few) when I wrecked my PC. When this happened the first time I was forced to seek professional assistance (and pay for it) to get things re-installed since I had no clue what to do. Fortunately the person who did the repairs happened to be the father of one of my ex-students and so the costs were greatly reduced and he showed me exactly what to do if it ever happed again. Well being a teacher and always having a pen in my pocket, I took very good notes and low and behold it did happened again (twice on fact), but fortunately I was able to rectify the situation using my good notes.

A short while ago my brother gave me the full version of XP Professional (with disc and Product Key) as well as some other apps including MS Office 2003, which he obtained from the company he works for when they upgraded their own systems.

Unfortunately I have just wrecked my PC for the 3rd time. My intention is to spend the time fixing it, ensuring that it is as close to perfect as possible and to then duplicate everything (operating system, software and all my personal files) on to another drive.

This raises a number of issues that I am hoping you will either be able to assist me with or point me in the right direction.

1. Should I do a clean install with XP Pro from the disc instead of just re-installing XP Home from the recovery drive ?
2. What do I need to do to wipe the hard drive completely clean in preparation for installation of XP Pro?
3. Do I keep the recovery portion or do I wipe that clean as well ?
4. Is there anything that I must do to "prepare (format ???)" the clean hard drive before installing XP Pro ?
5. What procedure must I follow to install XP Pro ?
6. I purchased an external hard drive (160 GB). My idea was to use this drive to create an exact replica of the drive in my PC (after the new installation) so that I could literally plug in/plug out any of the drives and have everything (XP, software and files/folders) exactly the same This would obviously have to involve regularly updating my files so that the two drives remain identical. The idea is to prevent the situation where I need to re-install everything after a crash or lose all my dociments. Instead, all I would need to do is just "copy" everything from one drive to the next.
Is this possible and how could I do it ?


I am hopeful and if you can assist me, the most important thing would be for you to give me very clear guidelines of EXACTLY WHAT I need to do and HOW - when in doubt about how much or what you should explain, rather assume that I don't know and give more detail.


Kind regards and best wishes

I would just back up all the files you intend to keep if u are able to do so, and then format the entire drive and the partition so they are just 1 drive again and do a clean install from the XP Pro disc provided to you. all you need to do to perform a clean install is change the boot up option to read from your cd drive. it usually requires you to press the DEL Key or one of the F numbered keys to access your boot options., its pretty much self explanatory from there.

Hope all goes well

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Thank you Sniper210010
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