I have a compaq presario 1800T that has a upgraded 60HD. I had some ad ware installed on my computer that was impossible to remove. I have a legit copy of windows XP from my school (UB) and loaded that on the machine in hopes it would maybe get rid of the ad ware on the install but it did nothing. I then tried the recovery cd that came with the computer and it came up with a prompt that my computer was missing files necessary to run the recovery disc. I really just want to wipe the whole computer and start with a fresh copy of XP. Can anyone school me on how I might go about doing this?
write down the serial # of your current OS (important)
put in a win xp cd and restart the machine… it should boot off the cd and give you the option to install XP from scratch
deltree c:*.* /y
those recovery disc’s never work. 3 different computers i have needed at one point to be reformated and every time we put the damn recovery disc that came with the computer in “you are missing neccesary files”
fdisk
format c:
cd:\i386\winnt.exe
xp will load from scratch, and give u the option to use NTFS which i recommend.
Or you can just boot from the xp cd and it will walk you through reinstalling it from scratch also.
I usually do it the long way to make sure everything is off, i dont trust letting it do it automatically for me.
:tup:
Ive found that using the partion formatting on the xp cd works great, especially if ur not too computer litterate, but yeah just re-installing windows isnt gonna wipe out ur hd. when u do the install ide suggest, when it asks u to choose which partition ude like to install on, press d, for delete and then create a new partition(to which u will be installing), and if u wanna be super special u can make one partition, about 8 gigs, for ur operating system and another partition for where u will be storing all other files, ive found this works really well especially when u have OS problems, anyhow goodluck, if u need any help, lemme know, sn is the same a nickname here
Spencer, if you don’t wanna wipe the machine, might I suggest another adware removal tool. Check out http://www.sunbelt-software.com. Download their trial version of Counter Spy (30 days free). I’ve been using their software for sometime, and never had a single problem.