alawlor66430 said:
Aye it's got xp on it, I've not got anything on it but brewing software, all my musics on an external hard drive, so how do I reformat it?
You need a windows XP installation disc. If you have one of those you are good to go.
When the laptop boots up you should see an option for "Setup" or something like that. It's usually F10, Del, Esc, F12, or something like that. Once in there you are looking for "Boot options", again something like that. You will have an option to select the "Boot order". This is simply the order in which the bios checks the devices in your laptop for bootable software. You want to set this to your CD/DVD-Rom.
The above simply tells the bios that you want it to check the CD/DVD drive for bootable software before checking the HDD etc. If you don't do this then it will most likely ignore what's in the DVD/CD drive and just continue to boot from the HDD. However, on the off chance that it DOES check the DVD/CD drive first just reboot the laptop with the disc inside. If it doesn't work you need to change the bios setting.
An alternative to the above is if you have a "boot options" option on the bios screen. If you have that, usually F8, you can simply chose the CD/DVD drive for just 1 boot which will suffice. Press F8 to get the options up then select CD/DVD drive.
Ok, that's the complicated stuff done, now for the easy part. Disc in, boot the laptop into the windows setup (does it automatically when you have done the above) and then allow it to load. Once loaded you will get to a screen that shows your harddrive and how much space it has. At this point it is CRUCIAL that you have backed up anything important. You want to delete every partition that's there. There will be an option to delete partition, do this for every drive that you can see (DO NOT HAVE ANY DEVICES PLUGGED IN OR YOU MAY WIPE THEM BY ACCIDENT). Once it's finished simply hit enter on the drive that is left. Windows will install onto this partition. Leave it to do it's thing and answer any mediocre questions along the way.
Once you are finished you will have a fully reformatted laptop. All you need to do now is make sure that all the drivers for your various hardware components are installed, any that aren't need to be downloaded and installed. You can get them from the website for your laptop brand simply by going to support and typing in the model number in the downloads section.
Bish bash bosh. It'll take about 1-2 hours from start to finish :)
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