Reinstalling Windows

Last night, I decided to reinstall the operating system on my home computer. I use Windows XP Home Edition. So, at 6:41 pm, I shut off the computer, unhooked all of the cables, and opened the case. Then, I unplugged the data and power cables to the second hard drive, closed the case, reconnected all of the cables to the computer, inserted Darik's Boot and Nuke v.1.0.1 disk, and rebooted the computer.

I started DBAN in interactive mode, selected the "quick erase" method, turned off verification, and, at 6:47 pm, began wiping the C:\ drive. At 7:00 pm, wiping was forty-one percent complete. Sixteen minutes and eight seconds into the wipe, it was fifty percent complete. The wipe was complete at 7:24 pm.

Then, I removed the DBAN disk, labeled it, and powered off the computer. I rebooted the computer, inserted the Windows XP Home Edition operating system CD, and chose the regular, instead of the "fast," format option.

At 8:05 pm, formatting of the partition was complete. At 8:10 pm, the installation program reported thirty-nine minutes to completion. Fourteen minutes later, at 8:24 pm, the installation was complete.

At 8:28 pm, I removed the operating system installation CD and inserted the XP SP2 CD. AT 8:44 pm, Windows XP SP2 finished installing, and I restarted the computer. At 8:48 pm, I began installing Norton SystemWorks 2005 Premier. I chose the custom install to install all components. At 8:53 pm, I restarted the computer and removed the SystemWorks CD.

At 8:58 pm, I checked and discovered that the system drive had been designated E:\, because I forgot to unplug the CF card reader (which had become drive C:\)! I decided to reinstall the operating system, so that the system drive would be designated C:\. I unplugged the CF card reader.

At 9:00 pm, I inserted an Acronis Drive Cleanser CD and restarted the computer. I selected the fast wipe, and the program estimated twenty-three minutes remaining. The wipe completed at 9:29 pm, and I began installing the operating system. This time, I chose the quick formatting option.

The installation of the operating system was complete at 9:55 pm, and I started installation of the Windows Backup application. At 9:57 pm, I shut down the computer in order to reconnect the second hard drive.

At 10:04 pm, after reconnecting the second hard drive, I powered the computer back up and changed the CD-RW drive to drive letter E:\ and the second hard drive to drive letter D:\. The system had designated the system drive as C:\, just as I wanted. The reason that I wanted the system drive to appear as the C:\ drive, was because the Alohabob PC Backup program that I have assumes that the system drive is the C:\ drive. If the system drive is not the C:\ drive, then the backups will not be done properly.

Installation of the XP SP2 began at 10:09 pm and completed at 10:24 pm, after which I began installation of Norton SystemWorks with the default settings. At 10:38 pm, I started installation of Norton Personal Firewall 2005, and, at 10:46 pm, I began installation of BellSouth FastAccess Extreme ADSL service.

At 10:56 pm, I started downloading and installing eighteen Windows updates and ten Semantec updates. After rebooting the computer, I downloaded and installed four more Symantec updates.

At 11:27 pm, I began a full system scan with Norton AntiVirus and went to bed. This morning, I checked to see if any virus had been found. It had not. 292,045 files were scanned in fifty-two minutes and fifty-two seconds.