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General discussion

Reformatting

by nothreerules Sep 3, 2004 3:29AM PDT

I have this computer i bought for my daughter for school purposes. I do not know anything about it but want to take all the stuff that is on it and reformat it. Because im illiterate when it comes to this kind of stuff i was hoping maybe someone can guide me on how to go about this. Please if any of you can help please send me a message to avanderkooy@hotmail.com it would be a great help.

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2 Posts

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Re: Reformatting

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Sep 3, 2004 3:35AM PDT

Reformatting by "illiterate" usually results in a machine worse off than when they started. You should just uninstall what you can and use the machine.

This issue worsens on machines that people buy second hand since they may have no inventory of what hardware is in the machine or may not realise that they don't have the Operating System CD needed to install the OS from.

My advice is to just clean it up.

Bob

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Re: Reformatting

by billzhills Sep 3, 2004 4:12AM PDT

For the beginner you must have the orginal disks
that came with the machine. And drivers for devices
that have been added.

Think of cleaning out a garage. Removing all work benches, cabinets, shelfs and tools stacking them outside nice and neat. That night somebody steals everything. Now all you have is an empty room.

Formatting a hard drive is the same. You remove all the data (empty room) and rebuild the data using the orginal CDs' that came with the system. If you did not get the orginal disks .......

Compaq/HP will sell you the restore disks for your model system, if available. They can be purchased on-line.

See
http://www.pcguide.com/proc/index.htm

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