reinstall windows xp home

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Guest

I want to wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows xp. All I have is a dell
restoration disk.
Is this disk self booting or do I have to create a boot disk?
Is fdisk available to wipe the hard disk on the disk to clean the drive or
do I have to put it on a boot disk?
 
Recovery disks are self booting. After booting you will be offfered the
optionf to reintsallt he operating system and everything else that came with
the pc when you purchased it. Don't forget that after reinstalling you will
need to log on to the Windows Update site to install all the updates - this
may also include Service pack 2 unless it came pre-installed.
What will happen is that the imaged copy on your recovery disks will
over-write your hard drive. There is no way you can use fdisk fromt he
recovery disk. An alternative, if you want to use fdisk, is to boot yuor pc
with a windows 98 or ME startup disk. If you have an ntfs file system, after
booting with the win 98/me startup disk, you will be advised to use fdisk.
This is because the win 98/me startup disk cannot see ntfs partitions. If
your system has a FAT32 file system the win 98/me startup disk will boot
straight to DOS. From here you can either use fdisk or the format option.

--
John Barnett MVP
Associate Expert
http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org

The information in this post is supplied "as is". No warranty of any kind,
either expressed or implied, is made in relation to the accuracy,
reliability or content of this post. John Barnett shall not be liable for
any direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the
use of, or inability to use, information or opinions expressed in this
post..
 
I believe that using that disc will restore your computer to the way it
was when it came from the factory, wiping everything out and installing
fresh.
If you are having problems why not post them here and someone should be
able to help, reinstalling is usually the last step in troubleshooting.
Joan
 
John said:
I want to wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows xp. All I have is a dell
restoration disk.
Is this disk self booting or do I have to create a boot disk?
Is fdisk available to wipe the hard disk on the disk to clean the drive or
do I have to put it on a boot disk?
Click to expand...
You may also want to review the following two Dell support documents for
clarification and details.

Don


http://support.dell.com/Support/topics/global.aspx/support/kb/en/document?dn=1090151


http://support.dell.com/Support/topics/global.aspx/support/kb/en/document?dn=1091713
 
Will this process be any differnt if I have 2 hard drives. If i back up all
my files to the 2nd hard drive, I want to make sure I don't wipe out that
one. Does the computer know to wipe out the C drive and not the other?
 
If you have two hard drives then the recovery disks will install to the
'master' drive. Your second drive is 'slave' and therefore should remain
untouched. I have two hard drives and 4 operating systems. Two are on the
master and two on the slave.
Although i have a full retail copy of xp home i use the recovery disk that
came witht he pc to quickly install the operating system. When i do this it
completely erases the master drive and then installs the operating system (i
have a full retail copy of xp pro that is imaged so, after installing, i
shrink the partition on the master drive using partition magic down to
around 15GB then create a new partition of 20GB for XP Pro and then image XP
Pro back to the second partition. All of my data and document files are
backed up to my second partition which remains untouched.

--
John Barnett MVP
Associate Expert
http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org

The information in this post is supplied "as is". No warranty of any kind,
either expressed or implied, is made in relation to the accuracy,
reliability or content of this post. The Author shall not be liable for any
direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use
of, or inability to use, information or opinions expressed in this post..
 
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