[goldengravity]

Hi everyone,
I have a 2005 HP notebook with xp media center os. It's about that time to clean it up.
I want to nuke and boot and then run the factory reinstall dvd's including the driver dvd.
I'm afraid there might be bad bugs in the partitions.
I iso burned ubcd, and changed my bios to cd first.
My question is should i autonuke, interactive (mode to chose what partitions to nuke), or what
If i nuke all partitions will i then be able to go straight to the factory reinstall disk and it will guide me to create the partitions and add whatever is needed to complete the xp setup.
Or will nuking the whole blessed drive push me to extra steps for dos, fdsik,nts , create new partitions etc.
please help

Edited by goldengravity, 20 October 2008 - 11:16 PM.

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depends on how your system is designed to restore and what partitions are present....if you've got a small (usually less than a gb but maybe more) system partition that's there but doesn't have a drive letter and you can't see it in windows then that's probably a recovery partition where they keep the driver images etc..

if the only partitions on the system are the ones you made (or know about) then you can do the autonuke..

HOWEVER if you've got system recovery disks...and you do a destructive recovery...the recovery process SHOULD erase and format all the partitions for you anyway...so you wouldn't need to use DBAN from the UBCD disk

[dsenette]

depends on how your system is designed to restore and what partitions are present....if you've got a small (usually less than a gb but maybe more) system partition that's there but doesn't have a drive letter and you can't see it in windows then that's probably a recovery partition where they keep the driver images etc..

if the only partitions on the system are the ones you made (or know about) then you can do the autonuke..

HOWEVER if you've got system recovery disks...and you do a destructive recovery...the recovery process SHOULD erase and format all the partitions for you anyway...so you wouldn't need to use DBAN from the UBCD disk

[goldengravity]

Thanks Desenette,
How do you check to find out if there is a image partition?
I just recently performed a driver sw setup which reinstalls drivers. I'm not sure, but they might be kept in a partition. my computer mentions no way of reinstalling the os other than using the reinstall os which can do a repair as well.
My computer makes no note of an other drive, are hidden files kept in a partition like sys 32 or just on c: drive but kept hidden?