[FAQ] Essential Tips for Office 97 Beta Testers Reformatting Your Hard Drive

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We wrote this FAQ to answer the many questions we receive on this topic from our clients and other inquiring minds in the many electronic communities we frequent.

Essential Tips for Office 97 Beta Testers Reformatting Your Hard Drive

If you're one of the tens of thousands of Office 97 beta testers, you've no doubt by now received the gold code CD and been warned by Microsoft in the accompanying letter that a Remove All of any beta version of Office 97 just won't cut the mustard. Instead, you should reformat your hard disk before installing the gold code version. Ahem, well, so be it. We suspect many of you had already dedicated ("sacrificed" is probably a better term) a machine (or several) to the Office 97 beta cycle, as we did, so the reformat probably presents no serious data recovery or application re-installation issues. Nonetheless, here are the steps we recommend you follow so as not to find yourself rushing blindly into the process.

In a timed test of one PC — a Micron Millenia Plus P166 — on which things went fairly smoothly, it took 45 minutes from the time we started this whole process until Windows 95 was again operational, another 15 minutes to get Plus! set up (Dial-up Networking Server and System Agent), and another 10 minutes to get Office 97 (Custom / Select All) installed, all 209 MB of it. Forty-five minutes later we had Internet Explorer 3.01 installed off the CD, and verified with a live WWW browsing session. Add to this about an hour for research into an outdated SCSI controller device driver (see discussion in step 9 below).

Total time start to finish — three hours.

1. Make a complete backup, heck, make two.

This goes without saying. Who knows what little piece of invaluable data is lurking on this test PC?

2. Make a Startup diskette and test it..

You know how to do this. (If not, check our FAQ "Essential Tips for Configuring Windows 95".) The testing part involves a cold boot with the diskette in the boot floppy drive to make sure the diskette is good.

3. Make a note of your PC manufacturer's technical support number.

This number is often provided in the Device Manager tab (right-click My Computer / Properties). Jot it down since you may need it later if the hardware detection wizard has problems recognizing installed devices and settings.

4. Make note of any non-Office 97 applications you want to re-install.

A convenient location for such a list is at Control Panel / Add/Remove Programs / Install/Uninstall.

5. Gather together any manufacturer (OEM) master or disaster recovery CDs and disks, including disks containing any peripheral configuration utilities.

A really convenient feature of the Micron we based this list on is the Micron CD-ROM Boot Floppy. When booted, its simple menu-driven interface allows you to check the hard drive for a valid partition, check a partition for a valid format, and load CD-ROM drivers onto the hard drive.

6. Gather together any non-Office 97 application setup CDs and disks.

This way you're certain you have all the necessary disks on hand for re-installation. If you don't, and the PC is doing anything mission-critical, pull in the reins right here and don't do the reformat until you've got everything you need together in one place to expediently get the system back to its prior state.

7. Reformat the hard drive.

If you've been meaning to repartition your hard drive(s) to optimize the amount of space occupied on average by files, now's a good time to do it. The line command format c: /s will do the trick for a straight reformat. If you're running a SCSI drive, it's not necessary to low-level reformat the drive, all that's required is a Format command from MS-DOS.

8. Reinstall Windows 95.

This is typically where things may, or may not, get weird on you. Let's hope all goes smoothly.

9. With Windows 95 fully reinstalled, cold boot once or twice just to shake any loose ends out.

Play it conservative here and cold boot once or twice. This way you get a quick indication that all is well (or not) with the freshly reinstalled operating system. (See our FAQ Essential Tips for Configuring Windows 95 for a checklist to follow when configuring Windows 95.)

Note: in the System Properties dialog, make sure you carefully check Device Manager's list of installed devices and verify nothing's missing and also check the Performance filecard to be sure your File System and Virtual Memory are both 32-bit, and check for the tell-tale (and reassuring) "Your system is configured for optimal performance" notice. Otherwise you're running in the sub-optimal MS-DOS compatibility mode. We skipped checking the Performance filecard and it wasn't until two days later that we realized our oversight. In our case, we needed to copy an Adaptec SCSI controller device driver from the manufacturer's diskette because the driver that ships with Win95 is outdated.

10. Install Office 97.

We strongly recommend you do a Custom / Select All installation, but you'd best have plenty of barren real estate available because it'll cost you a whopping 209 MB. We suggest that, at a minimum, you run each Office 97 application right now and make sure everything starts up normally.

11. Install Internet Explorer 3.01 from the Office 97 CD.

To take full advantage of Office 97's plethora of Web integration features, you'll want the latest and greatest version of IE. And the fastest way to get it (as of the time of this writing) is right off the CD; in fact, Office 97 setup leaves a shortcut on your desktop titled "Setup for Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.01." Double-click it and let 'er rip. Once installed, test IE on your favorite Web site, say, http://www.primeconsulting.com.

12. Move any data back.

If you had any data on the PC and you want it back, go ahead and copy, move, restore from tape, or otherwise cajole it back onto your hard drive now.

It was a chore, it was pure drudgery, life just ain't fair sometimes, but now it's done and you can rest easy that no one at Microsoft will ever be able to say all those GPFs Word 8's pulling on you are because you were a beta tester and didn't reformat your hard disk before installing the gold code. Amen.

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