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Curt:
Hmm; I must see if I can get my hands on such a CD. All my PCs were pre-installed and with no disc; I was always too poor  :P

Carol Haynes:
In short: Explorer will crash at every start, also in safe mode, so I can't get into Win2K any "normal" way. The OS was fully updated, so it didn't help to feed it an installation CD, and there is no space or money for upgrading it to XP Pro. W2K cannot upgrade to XP Home.
-Curt (June 10, 2007, 10:34 AM)
--- End quote ---

Can you try a repair install of Win2k by booting from the original CD ? It should keep programs and data intact but replace all Windows files to 'fresh install' status.

Explorer crashes are often caused by addons and shell extensions being corrupted - you could try this:

Boot up and ignore the fact that Explorer has crashed. Wait until the system finishes booting (look for no disc drive activity) and then use CTRL/ALT/DEL to bring up the TaskManager and use File>Run ... enter "Explorer" in the box without the quotes and hit return. Sometimes it will run without problems if it is restarted manually when the system has had time to finish booting other programs.

If it crashes again you need to disable any addins/extensions - try killing everything that doesn't look totally essential in the Process pane of TaskExplorer and also kill of any services you can from the task explorer by using File > Run and enter "Services.msc" - stop all non essential services (use your common sense there). This may allow you to start Explorer - if so you can install Process Explorer (from SysInternals) and/or ShellEx (from NirSoft). Those two utilities should help you track down the offending extensions causing the problems. ShellEx has saved my system a number of times in the past.

Curt:
All my PCs were pre-installed and with no disc; -Curt (June 10, 2007, 10:45 AM)
--- End quote ---

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I should add that there is only some 3GB free.

Curt:
I should also clarify that my primary wish is to get my 25GB music, 10GB photos and 3GB e-books off the old Win2K and into my 'new' XP. I really don't care if I ever will get the old 500 MHz machine to work again.

Carol Haynes:
Simplest solution then is to use some imaging software to backup the old hard disc (something like Acronis TrueImage will do that from a bootable CD so you don't need a working windows - in fact you can use that to back up at file level too - though it would be incredibly slow).

Quickest way would be to put in an extra hard disc or use a USB hard disc. If you have 2 computers with LAN cards you could use TrueImage to save your backup to another computer which would make it convenient to work with. Once you have an image you can extract the files from the newly installed windows by mounting the image file - it then appears as another (virtual) hard disc and you can use copy and paste or drag files in Windows Explorer.

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