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Home > Archive > General Discussion > April 2004 > Help Me Please!!
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| skolly 2004-04-10, 9:27 pm |
| ...but i have a question and i cant find anyone to help me. youll have to forgive my ignorance. Im trying to find a place that outlines step by step how to get a completely "empty" hardrive back up and running. I formatted my laptop a while ago figuring I could simply use my bootable disk of windows 98 or xp to get it going again. Seems that didnt work, the drive i know for a fact works cause i was using it with sucess before i formatted the hard drive. It doesnt have a floppy drive so i see this being a problem. It simply says that it is an invalid system disk and I should insert a new disk and hit any key. Is there anywhere i can go to get a step by step instruction on how to get an operating system installed again. Your help in any shape or form would be greatly appreciated!!!
Matt | |
| Supertech 2004-04-10, 9:37 pm |
| Configure BIOS to boot from the CD. | |
| enforcer 2004-04-11, 8:59 am |
| Give more details of exactly the error message when you tried your 'bootable disk of windows 98 or xp to get it going again' | |
| DaDnDe 2004-04-12, 1:46 pm |
| if you have XP CD then boot from it.
it will ask you want you want to do.
then install windows. it will detect the drive and ask if you want to create a partition.
say yes(NTFS highly recommended) and specify a size.
for XP suggest a partition size of about 2-4 GB.
then make another partition and format it. this other partition can will be used to install programs.(this can be done after the OS install if you want)
i also usually make another partition for data and backup purposes. although keep in mind that backups on the same physical drive are not a good idea. (but it is fast and it will enable you to use the computer while you transfer the backup to something else like an external drive or CDRW)
ok easy right? but all the above assumes that one;
1)you have set BIOS to boot from CD
2) you are using a win XP CD and NOT a system recovery disk or any other OEM soulution.
3)Your bios has correctly detected your drive.
4) the drive is NOT a special case (RAID, SCSI, SATA etc...) |
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