Dick Mason wrote:
>I bought a used hard drive on ebay and when it arrived, it had XP Pro
>already installed.

If I received a hard drive preloaded with an operating system I would be
suspicious especially when you noted that it was an illegal copy. Who was
the system registered to? I can't believe that someone would sell a hard
drive with all of there personal information on it. Talk about a route to
identity theft...

>can I do a reinstall over the top of my existing copy or do I need to
reformat?

Yes you can however, given the circumstance revolving around your "used
purchase"; I would start from the beginning. As one person stated, there may
be "crapware" and who knows what all. This will give you an opportunity to
check the drive for bad sectors. You have indicated that you have,
>existing email messages, some of which are work related and fairly
>important and I would have a fair number of applications to reinstall

It is better to think about these things prior to accepting the drive and
it's contents...

Do yourself a favor and print the "important" mail or back it up to a CD and
go on about the task of redoing the drive. As for saving stuff, use the
"Import/Export" feature in Outlook. Save the information to a file and put
it on disk to reload later...

Sincerely,

Frank Suszka
netTek Computers
[log in to unmask]

               The NOSPIN Group Promotions is now offering
              Mandrake Linux or Red Hat Linux CD sets along
             with the OpenOffice CD...  at a great price!!!
             http://freepctech.com/goodies/promotions.shtml