I rarely reformat my boot drive. There are just too many "little things" that I find I forgot to backup or put somewhere that I could access when I'm re-installing. It doesn't do you much good to backup your driver files if you can't access those files when you have formatted and re-installed Windows until AFTER you have installed the drivers to be able to pull them off where you backed them up too. Or, if you can't remember what type video card, network card, CD, or other add on when it asks you to pick which one you have so it can re-install the driver. And Win 2000 to a certain extent and XP to a much greater extent, do not put everything in one folder. You have the stuff kept in your profile folder under Documents and Settings. And you have stuff kept in the Program Folder under that software's folder. Then you have stuff kept in the Common Files folder in Program Files and you have DLL files in the Windows or WINNT folder in System and System32 folders. And if you don't get all of these files back to their right place, the program they go to won't work until you re-install the whole program from scatch.
What I do is replace the hard drive with a new drive and make my current Boot Drive a second drive. If there isn't room to put a second drive in the case, I get a external Firewire or USB harddrive case and put it in that and make it an external drive. That way, worse case senerio, I can put the old drive back where it was and be back where I was before I started. Best case if I have a file I need, I still have everything the way it was and I can find the file or at least see where it use to be. Once I get my new drive working the way I want, I delete all the Windows and anything I don't need any more and I have a second drive for increased storage. If the drive really needs it, I can format it.
In your case, since you don't have disks, you can't go the new drive route unless you buy a CD version. Which is not a bad idea. If you can afford it, go for XP Pro and not the Home Version. XP Pro is a lot better and has a number of features that are easier to do than the Home Version, paticularly in the networking areas.
Even if you do what you are planning to do, you will find it a lot easier to back up and make accessible old files if you get a USB external harddrive. The 80 gig ones are not that expensive and you can copy everything from your C: drive on to it for backup. External drives are great and the Firewire and USB 2.0 are almost as fast as internal drives. And you can swap them out or take them with you to plug into another computer if you want.
Harddrives have gotten so inexpensive over the last few years. That's why I have over a terabyte and a half of disk space on my main computer. I outgrew CD, DVD and tape backups a long time ago because of my image files so find I have to use harddrives for backup storage.
Mike
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