I am not really having any problems of my own but a friend of mine wants me to reformat her Dell computer and install Windows on to the system again. I know how to do a reformat but are there any issues that I could have after performing the reformat/install? What do I need to look out for? I remember I reformatted a Compaq I believe and there was a seperate partition on the HD that I could not delete. So, does Dell have any issues?
Yes their HelpDesk sucks! Try and use their cd that is made for to reinstall Windows and if you are lucky she will have the cd that has all of the drivers for her pc. If you are installing W2K or XP, it should have the drivers for most of the hardware. Or you can go to www.dell.com and sign in and type the service tag and it will bring up all the drivers for that pc.
With the old compaqs and some of the newer ones they had their bios on an actual partition on the hard drive. I have reformatted and reinstalled on Dells before without any problems. It should be a basic and easy setup...then again it is you that is doing the install lol... JK
Have you not noticed that I have asked a lot LESS computer questions lately and have actually even responded with advice in some computer question threads started by other posters? I have been reading and doing some studying and I am learning this stuff pretty good now and I can never forget the knowledge I learn from the posters on this site that have responded to my many questions.
What about that chick...? Did SHE learn? Seriously, it's good to see you excel (no point intended) at this Computer stuff.
Lil Pun, As long as you do not destroy any partitions, you should be fine. Just reformat the C partition when installing the OS. It's your computer problem. Admit it.
Since January 2002 I have entirely reformatted my hard drive about 5 or 6 times.... before I do it again, is there a limit on how many times you can do this with windows XP.... I have never thought about it before, but I think I read something like that recently on this board.
I recommend that, before you reformat, you write down the make and model of specific pieces of hardware (sound card, video card, network card, modemetc.)... download the appropriate drivers for all those pieces and burn them to a disk. It can be quite troublesome trying to download those drivers on a new system if you can't get networking up and running. And it's good to have a master copy of those drivers anyway. I also recommend that we create a whole new forum named "Lil Pun's Computer Questions" -- droxford
Do you have the Dell Resource CD? Make sure u install the Chipset Video and Audio before the rest of the drivers In fact .. u should use the Windows Reinstallation CD for the whole thing. .. . it will reformat and start the install Rocket River hit me up if u need more
Generally, it's when you replace h/w (usually the hard drive) where this could cause a problem. I believe a "license string" (for lack of a better term) is generated when you install XP. Your HD serial number is factored into that string so if you change it out, there won't be a match. If there is a problem becuase of your reformatting, a call to MS should fix things.
