Help Puh-lease

[Missnell]

I need to know how to completely wipe everything off my pc and start again. My b/f was trying to be clever with it and ended up screwing it into the ground. i dont want to take it to the computer shop guy so i thought i might be able to do it myself. All i want to do is wipe it completly, cause now a lot of programmes dont open. and then reinstall xp. And someone told me about loading Win 98 but i cant cause all i have is xp so can someone please help me?

[VHockey86]

Need more details about the computer to know where to start... what operating system came with it? It looks like xp by the sounds of the post.

In short, you boot to the windows xp cd, reformat the hard drive, then install windows.

More specifically:
Put your windows XP cd in the cd-rom drive. And restart. It *should* prompt you to "press any key to boot from cd," If not, you probably need to change the boot order in the BIOS (Which isnt all that difficult).

Assuming it boots to the cd, it will go through a 1-2 minute loading process and you will promoted with a menu. Select install windows, I believe it gives u license agreemnt here (I havent done it in a little while so its hard for me to specifically remember what the sequence of screen is). Just follow onscreen instructions. When you reach the list of hard drive partitions (C: and such), select the partition and look for "delete partition." This is where you basically lose hope of recovering you data without quite a hell of alot of work, and some luck. Hopefully you have important things backed up, or if you dont try to get them on a cd from windows (if it still boots).

Now when u get back to the same partition screen, select create partitoin, follow instructions. Then highlight the partition and select install windows. From here on its pretty simple, just follow onscreen instructions.

[butch81385]

first of all, you can try doing a system restore to a point before he screwed it up...

if not you can run fdisk (someone else can explain these both in detail, but at least you know what to look for).

[Droppyale]

all you have to do is boot from the windows xp cd, and it should take you throuhg the steps of formating and reinstalling the OS.

[butch81385]

yea, that too

[I2n0ld]

Originally posted by Droppyale
all you have to do is boot from the windows xp cd, and it should take you throuhg the steps of formating and reinstalling the OS.

well said. but i have to add, make sure u boot off of ure cd drive not floppy. u can do that by going to bios and changing the boot sequence. going to bios usually pressing delete key (for me f1, depends on ure computer, u can look it up on manual or by telling us here wut kind of computer u have), after pressing start .

come back if u have any problems. hope that will help. good luck

[jmichna]

Freeware 'Killdisk' will "zero-write" the drive, returing it to a factory-shipped state. http://www.killdisk.com/
Create the Killdisk floppy, go into BIOS and set floppy drive as first boot device, boot with Killdisk floppy, zero-write the drive. When finished with the HD re-write, go into BIOS, set your CD-ROM as the first boot device, put your XP install CD in the drive and boot up, follow the installation prompts. You will be prompted to partition and format the drive... XP will take care of that for you.