can you reinstall windows without losing a bunch of shit on your computer?

no - you will need to save your stuff somewhere like an external hard drive or cds

Reinstalling an O/S won't affect other programs or files, unless of course you aren't going to wipe the whole drive first.

What Windows are you running and why do you want to reinstall?

XP

I lost a bunch of stuff on my computer (calculator, wav editor, games) and want them back. Mostly the wav editor.

As long as you don't format the drive, or upgrade to an OS which uses a different file system ( windows98 -> XP) You can reinstall without losing your data or file installs.

You don't even have to reinstall the OS for this - just go to Control Panel, add/remove programs, then select Add/Remove Windows Components.

You'll need the XP disk, most likely, though.

I tried re-installing them and nothing. I knew I shouldn't have messed around with the registry.

Did you try doing a system restore to a point before you went mucking around in the registry? System Restore has worked well for me several times.

OH CRAP WHY DID YOU DO THAT

This is wrong.
It is a good idea to back up your files just in case, but most likely not necessary.



This is contradictory.

You should be able to do a reinstall or a repair when you insert the XP disc. If it doesn't autostart there should be an .exe file to run, like setup.exe or something. Even if you reinstall the operating system and all goes to hell and the computer no longer boots up, you can easily take the hard drive out of the machine, change the jumper settings to make it a slave drive, and stick it in another machine, or external hard drive case. (external case would still be master jumper settings.)

The oldest system restore point is from wednesday. This crap happened before that.

So will I lose all my mp3's and other files if I reinstall windows?

Haha. I want this on my tombstone.

This seems weird. There should be almost one a day for the last few months.



No. If something goes wrong, you can always put the drive into another machine or case.

Whatever you do, DON'T FORMAT THE DRIVE.

Stick the Windows XP disk in the drive and do a repair installation.
- If this works, you won't have to reinstall any programs

If that doesn't work, reinstall windows, without formatting the hard drive to the same directory windows is installed in now.
- If this works, you might have to reinstall some programs, depending on how badly screwed up the registry is.

If that doesn't work...boot off the windows CD, go to the rescue/recovery tools, and delete the /windows directory (NOTHING ELSE) and reinstall windows. You will have to reinstall all of your programs after this.

If for some sick reason, you decide that you want to reformat your hard drive, you will need to back up your files to either a different hard drive, or CD's/DVD's. If you can afford it, I'd just buy a new hard drive in this case, and reinstall windows on that.

I think its best to have two hard drives or a hard drive with two partitions for this very case. If you screw up your windows install, you can wipe it clean, without worrying about your media files. I suppose you could even keep your documents and stuff on the drive too, but who really uses a home PC for any real work anyways.

Did that. I think everything's fine now.