[Biggene]

I purchased a used dell laptop of an associate because of software problems he was having. Now I need to reformat the hardrive to delete whatever conflicts he created. but i don't have a dell recovery disc. I do have a working version of XP I already installed but it just installed the system over the old system and kept all the old files and conflicts. now I just want a fresh start. but without a startup disc i cant do anything. How can I reformat this harddrive then install windows XP again?

Any advice is greatly aooriciated

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Howdy and welcome to G2G:

If you can boot up using the XP cd, you should get a couple options

Repair XP
Re-install XP
Boot from hard-drive..

If you get these options, choose to re-install..

You may also only get boot from hard-drive or boot from cd.. Pick the boot from cd option..

Once it sets up, you should get an option to remove all partitions and install XP.. That's the one you want!!

Murray

[Murray S.]

Howdy and welcome to G2G:

If you can boot up using the XP cd, you should get a couple options

Repair XP
Re-install XP
Boot from hard-drive..

If you get these options, choose to re-install..

You may also only get boot from hard-drive or boot from cd.. Pick the boot from cd option..

Once it sets up, you should get an option to remove all partitions and install XP.. That's the one you want!!

Murray

[Jacamus]

Try a win 98 boot disk.
At a prompt type fromat.
then boot from the xp d you have and install a fresh ver of xp.

[Murray S.]

Jacamus:

A Win98 boot disk won't format the hdd as DOS won't recognize the XP NTFS file system!!

Murray

[Jacamus]

Doh!

[Biggene]

Thanks for the advise I tried it but it didn't work. It's telling me I can't install the older versin of windows xp over the newer version. This is because when I installed windows over the the original copy of xp, I upgraded to service pack 2.
I've also went into the bios setting to make the laptop boot from the cd but no matter how i configure it it still boots to the harddrive. I even disabled the harddrive and it told me I had no bootable drives found.
How can I get this to booot from the cd? Or Is there a place I can download a windows 98 startup disc and boot from that, if thats recommended?

Thanks again in advance.


disregard the 98 question i just read it

Edited by Biggene, 09 June 2005 - 11:59 AM.

[Jacamus]

Recovery console?
use the format command.

[Murray S.]

Okay..

Going to do an update on Jacamus' suggestion..

You can use the Win98SE floppy but there are a couple extra steps you need to take.. also, you have to be able to boot from the cd-rom after so the BIOS setup is a MUST!!

First of all, is this an original XP cd or a copy made by you or someone else.. The setup procedure is different!!

Murray