Windows Vista help...!

[Nat_H]

I'd like to call on the collective minds of PH to point me in the right direction for the following;

I have a Dell laptop, which is around 3 years old, and runs Vista.

When I bought the laptop I partitioned the hardrive to allow easy recovery of data (or so I thought).

Over the weekend, my laptop refused to boot up, and I encountered numerous BSOD, and after a little research I put it down to the registry becoming corrupt. Windows tried to fix these issues, but it couldn't, so I was left with no choice other than try and recover the OS.

Alas, Windows could not find a valid recovery point, so I had to reinstall Vista.

When started the reinstall process, it displayed my two partitions, 1 with 10gb, and the other with 200+ gb.

Not wanting to lose my data (music and photos), I formatted the 10gb partition, and reinstalled Vista successfully, and now I can access all my data on the other partition, but it’s far from ideal as my user profile/settings etc are all on the 2nd partition, and it’s a bugger to keep having to go from the C: to the D: drive to access things.


Now to my question;

Should I copy off all my data to an external hard drive, and reformat the whole disk, and start again, create new partitions and then copy the data back?

Or is there an easy way to restore the previous user accounts back to the new install of Vista.

(I am planning on backing up the data to an external hard drive anyway)

Thanks

Edited by Nat_H on Wednesday 31st March 12:14

[itsnotarace]

Create a brand new administrator account and login with it. Locate the old profile stuff you want to copy on the D: drive and copy it to your C:\documents and settings\username maintaining the same folder structure

I would probably only copy the required subfolders (desktop/ favourites and so on) rather than copy the entire profile folder across as you don't want to end up with a corrupted profile, as you will obviously need to overwrite existing files.

[Nat_H]

Ok cool, thanks for the pointers.

Should I also try and expand the size of the C: drive as its only 10gb?

[blank]

You can change the default locations of your documents, music etc. folders.

Just navigate to say C:\Users\Nat_H\ Then right click on say My Music. On the location tab you can change that to where all your music is.

[Nat_H]

blank said:

You can change the default locations of your documents, music etc. folders.

Just navigate to say C:\Users\Nat_H\ Then right click on say My Music. On the location tab you can change that to where all your music is.

Ideal, and how would/should I go about recovering two itunes accounts? (my other half had a vista account with her own itunes, as so did I)

[The_Jackal]

Do your first idea.
Copy off all your data and reinstall windows properly. Otherwise, you will be forever bodging the install copying config files from D to C and trying to get stuff to work.

Why would you not want a clean install of Windows, that is your best chance of everything working properly. Especially with Vista.

[Nat_H]

After an afternoon of thinking and research, I think the backup idea is best, and upgrading to Windows 7 at the same time.

The only thing that concerns me is itunes, as I do like my iphone.

Edited by Nat_H on Wednesday 31st March 17:16

[The_Jackal]

iTunes works fine under Win7, its not an issue.
Just backup your whole music/itunes folder. at worst you just import it all again to a new library.