Please Help: Reformatting Question

  • Thread starter Thread starter Louise
  • Start date Start date
L

Louise

I bought my pc off a friend, and I need to reformat it but the disc has been
lost can anyone help me in simple terms as to what I can do
 
Louise said:
I bought my pc off a friend, and I need to reformat it but the disc has
been
lost can anyone help me in simple terms as to what I can do
Click to expand...

If you don't have a disk, then you can't reinstall, unless there is what's
called a "recovery partition".

You can of course format the drive, but that isn't going to help you a lot,
as once that's done, the system won't have an operating system till you
install one.

You can borrow an XP boot CD and format using that - there isn't really any
licensing issue using an XP CD for this - or you can attach the drive to
another system and format it from there.

I suspect that what you ultimately wanted to do goes a bit further than just
formatting the drive. More details on that might get you more information.

HTH
-pk
 
Louise said:
I bought my pc off a friend, and I need to reformat it but the disc has
been
lost can anyone help me in simple terms as to what I can do
Click to expand...


If it was a commercially built machine, you may be able to get a factory
restore cd from the manufacturer at a nominal
fee
 
Louise said:
I bought my pc off a friend, and I need to reformat it but the disc
has been lost can anyone help me in simple terms as to what I can do
Click to expand...

Unless your friend provided you with either the CDs needed to do a
reinstall, or instructions for performing a reinstall based on the
on-disk partition/s, AND gave the current key code to use, all you
bought was a piece of hardware. You still need to buy an operating
system and any other programs you want to use.
Go back and ask the friend; he'll know what's what. The most
important thing you need to do is get an operating system installed and
get it activated.

HTH

Twayne
 
Back
Top