OT :Formatting hard drive

Hi David,

Depends whether its Fat32 or NTFS format to begin with. If it is running XP chances are its NTFS and this being the case, all you need to do on most laptops is press F12 when booting to give you a multi boot screen HDD, FDD or CD-ROM. With your XP disk in the rom drive just tell it to boot from CD, then I always suggest delete the partition and re-set it up. If you read all the screens after boot up from the CD it is easy to achieve.

If its 98 you will need a boot disk which can make in control panel, then boot from it and load from rom.

Have fun, Geeeeze now I don't have a Job LOL

Blaze has pretty well covered it all.

Recommend XP for sure. Initial installation will ask "do you wish to format the hard drive" and also what size primary partition you want. If a 40 gb drive or thereabouts give the primary partition as 100% the size of the hard disk and for XP an NTFS formatted option will work best. If the drive is around the 80 Gb mark, you can allocation say 40 Gb for the primary partition (C drive) and the remainder as the secondary partition. (D drive) This way you can direct all your data, pictures, etc. to D drive and leave C drive for the operating system and additional programs.

Just makes the operation and performance of your "new" Laptop that much better.

Gday,
Be scared......If your not good with computers you can really make a mess of it doing that sort of thing!
Take it from someone who knows. Ive done some serious damage playing with things like DOS, BIOS, partitions, boot discs etc etc. Sometimes a little knowledge can be more dangerous than none! If you need to ask the question I would personally say dont do it.....

Good luck

Hi David

Download killdisk onto floppy and run the program here,use free version

killdisk

Then install winxp from fresh

Cheers

if you want more info just text me (warfer2002 @ hotmail.com)

and by the way DONT BOTHER with Vista till at least first big service patch or the first year..

cheers mate

Blaze, Sand Man et al,

What are you blokes doing? Your predecessors took great pains to hide all that knowledge away from the great unwashed so it could remain one of the 'dark arts' and here you are giving the game away !!!!

Many an old techo is rolling over in his grave ( or at least sitting uncomfortably at his screen ) now that you have revealed the Great Secrets LOLOL

Did you get the "Recovery CD" set with the laptop?

If not, you will have to do an install of XP with native XP drivers and then go to the web and get all the special drivers for your model. If XP doesn't recognize the network card you could be in a catch 22 - no web access to get the drivers you need for web access !! You will need drivers for Modem, NIC, Chipset, Touchpad, Video, and maybe a couple of others as well.

There's a good chance the XP install of the laptop won't have SP2 so you will be faced with quite a few hours of updates to bring it up to date.

Then you can put your Antivirus on, and start installing your programs, printers, stc and configuring your e-mail, etc

My suggestion - find someone who knows about this process and let them do it.

Outnabout David

Is it a HP laptop?

HP laptops come with the recovery software in a hidden partition on the harddrive. If you run the recovery program it will do it for you. If you format the drive yourself you will destroy that software.

If you have a manual - read it. If not go online and download one.

Tjilpi

Do people really still use FDDs and floppys? Ihaven't seen one for a long time.