Installation Types

Deciding on the type of installation to perform is dictated by many factors, such as the following:

• Is there an operating system currently installed? If so, do you want to preserve settings and configurations, or start from scratch?

• Will the installation be performed interactively or remotely?

• How many computers are to be installed at a single time?

• Is your network arranged in a domain model using Active Directory?

These are many of the questions that lead to the answer for the larger question: What type of installation will you be performing? There are three distinct possibilities and each of them is explored in the following sections.

Upgrade Installations

Windows XP Professional supports direct upgrades from Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, Windows 2000 Professional, and Windows XP Home Edition. If you are currently running any other operating system, including Windows NT 3.x Workstation, Windows 95, or Windows 3.x, you will need to perform a clean installation as upgrading is not supported.

Note

Although we assume most readers of this book are using Windows XP Professional, you might want to note that you can also upgrade Windows 98 and Me (but not Win2K Pro or NT4) to XP Home Edition.

An upgrade installation is most useful in cases where you have customized user settings that you want to preserve. This option, however, does not always work flawlessly, especially if you are upgrading from an operating system other than Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Home Edition due to the differences in the Registry structure and the startup process.

Should you decide to upgrade an existing Windows 98 or Windows Millennium Edition installation to Windows XP (and you allow a backup to be made during installation), you will be able to later uninstall Windows XP and effectively revert your computer back to the state it was in immediately preceding the Windows XP upgrade. The ability to uninstall is contingent on the following factors, however:

• The volume on which Windows XP is installed cannot be converted from the FAT32 file system to the NTFS file system.

• You cannot create or delete any volumes on the computer.

• You must not delete the backup files that are created during Windows XP installation. Thirty days after installation, you will be prompted to delete these files. If you do not intend to revert back to your old OS, there's no reason not to delete them.

The easiest process is to upgrade from an installation of Windows 2000 Professional or Windows NT 4.0 Workstation to Windows XP Professional. Windows XP Professional shares a common operating system structure and core with these two operating systems, including device driver requirements and Registry structures. If you upgrade a Windows NT 4.0 Workstation installation that is installed on an NTFS formatted volume, the file system will be automatically upgraded from NTFS 4.0 to NTFS 5.0 as part of the installation process. If the file system is FAT, you will be presented with the option to upgrade to NTFS during the installation.

When upgrading from older Microsoft operating systems, there are a few gotchas to be aware of. The following list details some items of concern when upgrading from Windows 98 or Windows Millennium Edition to Windows XP:

• System tools such as ScanDisk and DriveSpace will not be upgraded in Windows XP. Windows XP brings along its own version of ScanDisk, and NTFS compression replaces legacy compression utilities such as DriveSpace.

• Client software for other network types cannot be upgraded during an upgrade to Windows XP. The only exception to this rule is that if Novell Client32 is installed, the setup routine will detect it and replace it with a newer version of Client32 from the Windows XP Setup CD-ROM.

• Some applications might not run properly under Windows XP due to the fact that the Windows XP Registry is arranged differently than the Windows 98 or Windows Millennium Edition Registry. In some cases, migration packs can alleviate this problem. A migration pack (or upgrade pack) is simply a set of new application and library files for a specific application that enables it to run in a newer, more advanced environment than it was originally designed for.

• Some applications might not run properly under Windows XP if they attempt to make calls to APIs that don't exist in Windows XP. In some cases, migration packs can alleviate this problem. In other cases, you will need to remove the application from your computer. The Windows Upgrade Advisor typically identifies these applications for you.

• Some applications might not run properly under Windows XP if they install different files under different operating systems. In this case, you reinstall the application following the upgrade to attempt a fix.

• Applications that directly access hardware or use custom file filters will most likely not run correctly under Windows XP. The most common cases of these types of problems are related to CD-ROMburning software and antivirus software. You will need to obtain updated versions of these types of applications for use with Windows XP.

All that said, there are some things to watch out for when upgrading from Windows NT 4.0 Workstation as well:

• File system filters written for Windows NT 4.0 will not work with Windows XP due to the upgrade in NTFS. This is commonly seen in antivirus software.

• Networking software written for Windows NT 4.0 will not run on Windows XP if it attempts to use the Windows NT 4.0 TCP/IP or IPX/SPX protocol stacks.

• Custom power management solutions written for Windows NT 4.0 are not compatible with Windows XP and are not required due to Windows XP's native support for ACPI (Advanced Power Configuration Interface) and APM (Advanced Power Management).

• Custom Plug-and-Play solutions written for Windows NT 4.0 are not compatible with Windows XP and are not required, as Windows XP provides full Plug and Play support natively.

• Fault-tolerant disk arrangements, such as disk mirrors, are not supported in Windows XP. Windows 2000 Server and Windows .NET Server support disk mirroring and striping.

Should you have an unsupported upgrade path or decide that you would rather perform a clean installation, but do not want to lose all of your personalized settings, don't despair. You can transfer a large majority of your personalized settings (and even your document files) by using either the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard (FSTW) or the User State Migration Tool (USMT). Full details on performing an upgrade installation of Windows XP and use of these tools can be found in Chapter 3.

One last point about upgrade installations before you move on to clean installations: You cannot perform upgrade installations over the network using Remote Installation ServicesRIS only supports clean installations.

Clean Installations

Clean installations are the easiest to perform and should result in the least amount of work at installation time. A clean installation is required in any of the following situations:

• You have an unsupported upgrade path, such as from Windows 95.

• There is no operating system currently installed on the computer.

• The computer has more than one partition, and you want to configure the computer to support multibooting .

• You are performing installations across the network using Remote Installation Services.

• You prefer to perform a clean installationso as to "start over with a clean slate," rather than risk encountering some of the issues that can crop up from performing an upgrade installation.

When performing a clean installation, there are really no problem areas to watch for in general. The most common problem that people run into is trying to install Windows XP Professional onto a computer in which the CD-ROM is not El Toritocompliant (it does not support booting from the CD-ROM drive). In this case you will need to acquire the Windows XP Setup Boot Disk creation utility ( makebt32.exe ) by visiting MSKB# 310994, at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;enus;310994. The makebt32.exe utility will enable you to create a set of setup boot floppy disks; however you will need to have six disks in Windows XP instead of the four disks you needed for Windows 2000 Professional.

You'll find a step-by-step guide through the process of performing a clean installation of Windows XP later in this chapter.

Note

At the time this was written, service pack 2 was the latest update for Windows XP. If Microsoft has released service packs past the one integrated into your Windows XP installation disc, or if you are using a Windows XP installation disc produced before service pack 1 was released, you should install the most recent service pack after completing your initial installation. You can do that before or after using the Settings Transfer Wizard described previously in this chapter and further detailed in Chapter 3.

Multibooting with Other Operating Systems

Your last installation option is to install Windows XP Professional in a multiboot situation with one or more other operating systems, including other instances of Windows XP. Installing in a multiboot situation encompasses either an upgrade installation or clean installation as wellthe same rules and caveats apply. The chief difference is in the formatting of the System partitionthe place where the files required to start up the computer are loaded. If you are planning on multibooting with an older operating system that does not recognize the NTFS file system, such as Windows 98, you will need to ensure that the System partition is never formatted or converted to the NTFS file system.

The only real trick to successfully installing Windows XP Professional into a multiboot arrangement is that it must be the last operating system installed. As a rule, you should always install Microsoft operating systems from oldest to newest, so if you had a new computer, for example, and you wanted to install Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000 Professional, and Windows 98 on it, you would first install Windows 98, then next install Windows 2000 Professional, and lastly install Windows XP Professional. Of course, you must place each operating system instance in its own separate hard disk partition and you cannot set up a multiboot system using dynamic disks, as only one operating system can own a dynamic disk or dynamic disk set. Lastly, do not install Windows XP Professional on a disk that is compressed using a third-party compression utilityit is not supported and the installation will most likely fail.

For more information on partitioning a hard disk, see "Disks, Partitions, and Volumes," p. 446.

Of course, there is one big exception to the rule concerning the order in which you must install the operating systems (remember, oldest to newest). If you are using some sort of third-party boot loader, such as BootMagic from Symantec , its files will create and control the boot menu and operating system selection process. You also gain the capability to install more than one instance of a Windows 9 x operating system when using a third-party boot loader.

One such third-party boot loader is BootMagic, which is part of the Norton PartitionMagic application. BootMagic provides an enhanced boot menu. Read more about PartitionMagic on the Symantec website, located at http://www.symantec.com/partitionmagic/.

Note

You can only install one instance total of Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Millennium Edition on a computer without using a third-party boot menu application.

Now that you've done all of your homework, you should be ready to deploy Windows XP, at least in the most common scenarios. If your installation is a normal one (by normal, I mean not using exotic procedures such as Remote Installation or disk imaging), you should be ready to move on to the installation phase as discussed in the next section. If you are planning on using Remote Installation or disk imaging, you will find that information beginning with the section "Automated Deployments," on page 73, later in this chapter.