I saved my butt by a ten second preventative trick

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I just had to do a c drive reformat on a windows 98 system (again). I was frustrated but – hey life happens! This time, though, all I lost were my programs. After my last crash and need to reformat the C drive I had most of my stuff on backup but not all. This time I had it all without having to use my backup media. I had gone to my documents, on my desktop, and right clicked and then clicked on properties. Where it says Target Folder Location I changed it from C:My Documents to D:My Documents. And I made it a way of life to keep EVERYTHING that I create myself (or download, etc.) in My Docs. So this time I reinstalled windows 98 and all my stuff was waiting for me on D. I am feeling pretty smug right now – so easy to do yet so important. Now all I need to do is figure out how to put my Outlook stuff on D – anyone here know how – Outlook is weird and I have not really played with it too much. I don’t want a back-up on D -(that I can do) I want all my info to be there by defualt. When I create a new journal entry I want it to go to D or a new contact, etc? Oh well – I’m going to ask in the outlook forum.

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It’s quite easy isn’t it? Move the .pst file to D: then next time you start Outlook it will say it can’t find the .pst file and ask you if you want to create one or specify where it is. So show it where the file now is and you have achieved your aim.

Ian

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Sounds fine provided you have a second disk drive. Just don’t neglect to backup both drives now.

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The theory should still work on a single large drive, partitioned to give you C and D, with the ability to reformat C on it’s own. No?

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What if something goes wrong with the drive itself? If you lose the drive you lose all the partitions.

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True – but that is a different point – albeit a valid reminder that nothing beats a backup.
I was simply trying to make it clear that should the need arise to re-format your C drive prior to a re-installation, it would not necessarily have to be on another physical drive.
i.e. With OS on (partition) C: and data on (partition) D:, C: can be re-formatted and the OS re-installed without affecting D:.
In an ideal world, mirroring would be standard. And free.

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We’re all correct.

My reason for the previous post was a concern that the innocent might not realise that the proposed solution would not protect them in the event of a hardware failure to the disk drive.

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