Formatting problems?

recovery discs are the worst thing since the congestion charge lol.

right sound like you have got a pre-built pre installed system thats gone wrong, and it also sound sliek the partition that you are installing the new installation is quite frankly knackerd.

so what i would do i delete all the partitions (it will give you easy instruction on screen) and since you are starting fresh don't have to panic so much .

generally give a portioned drive if say ona 80gb HDD around 10-20gb for the main partition , this is the one where you are going to install the new operating system, you can later format the other partition so you can save files etc to it .

you would need to delete all partitions so that it gets you to start from fresh, and then create a partition so say 20gb would be 20000, place that number in and your sorted.

carry on with the installation, preferably xp disc... i would use the pro version and not vista as you have more chance of success, you also need to select a full format and NTFS and NOT a quick format as this ensures that the HDD is dealt with and gets rid of most to near all issues.

Mathew lisett
December 2007

Hi

Most off the shelf PCs are all supplied with recovery disks such as you have.

Providing your friends have PC's with Windows XP installed, they should also have installation discs for their PC's. If you borrow their disks and give it a whirl using them and see if the same error occurs, thus allowing you to determine where the problem is stemming from.

Just as a note, I wouldn't recommend using recovery disks with Dell or Emachines on the front of the disks, HP disks are OK and of course proper XP disks. If you work in an office then your IT dept should have an abdundance of these and wont miss one going awry

Good luck

Urban Kaos
November 2007

I'm using the Targa Recovery disc supplied with these PC's. I didn't know I could use something else (pardon my ignorance, I'm new to this). What do I need to get??

Brendan
November 2007

Have you tried a different operating system CD?

Darren
November 2007