Format Harddrive With Pre-installed O/S And No Recovery Disc
Apr 12, 2012
I bought a HP Laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium pre-installed. I got rid of any bloatware and as I'm typing this, Macrium is imaging my C drive to a network drive. Now my question is, would I be able to completely format the computer, set up my own partitions and install Windows on one of them? Preferably a fresh and clean version but I wouldn't mind the bloatware one either. Things to consider, I don't have a disk-drive so it'd have to be done with a thumbdrive; I have not been able to find the actual O/S product key, if someone could tell me where to locate it.
My son is running Windows 7 Pro on a sad little 1 Gb RAM PC 3.4 GHz and of course it is somewhat underpowered and the PC is badly in need of a formatiing anyway..Problem is I can't get to a Format command anywhere??????I can get into BIOS OK, set the DVD as first boot option but when I save it (F10) and then it reboots, the screen always comes up with the "Start Windows Normally" option! I can reach the "boot from any CD/DVD option but for some weird option the arrows on the keyboard will not alow me to move away from this latter choice yet the board works fins with everything else.I can't get it to boot from the original Win 7 CD, Windows Vista or even Pro OS's ................ so of course again cannot get to the format command.I have created a System Recovery Disc but I am not 110% sure how to use this disc but nonetheless cannot seem to find an option for formatting there anyway.
i am planning to install windows 7 very soon but am worried that while installing windows 7,vista will be completely formatted if doing a fresh installation in-case if i don't like it, can i re-install vista using the recovery disc?my pc came with vista installed on it so i dont have a guniene DVD for vista.
I would like to install windows 7 on my desktop. It is currently running windows XP. I'm not sure what i did but i wound up installing Windows XP "twice" on the C drive. I booted up windows 7 and installed it sucessfully but the windows XP is still on the drive.
I've gotten to the point where I need to just reinstall windows completely on my Asus G74SX (too many problems, I want to start fresh.). I encounter an error 1029 with Asus's recovery disks that I made when I had windows working: it says it is recovering all the way to 100% then doesnt work. I am in the process of trying it again so I'll see if it actually managed to wipe my hard drive like it said it was doing, and maybe if it did actually work and reinstall windows.However, I'd like to be able to get into the recovery partition because I would prefer restoring it with Asus as they recommend me to. However, when I hit F9, their target to get there, it doesn't do anything and just reloads the boot screen, with the Asus logo on it. I don't have an actual Wndows recovery CD so that's not an option, and at this point since my hard drive has likely been wiped by these recovery DVDs, I don't think going into Ubuntu and fixing the MBR will do me much good anymore.It may be worth noting that before I last restarted, I marked the Windows partition as active because of a tutorial here, making it so that recovery partition isn't active anymore.
Last night I managed to copy some photographs onto a CD- R disc and they played on the TV through a DVD player. This evening I attempted to load some photographs onto some discs which came with no marking on them so they must have been cheap. The outer cover of the discs said,DVD-R and when I attempted to start to use them a message which I set out below came up saying the disc needed formatting. I looked up how to format a disc and I followed the instructions as far as I could which I set out below.
1. Insert a disc into your computer's CD or DVD drive. I did that. 2. In the dialog box that appears, click Burn files to disc. That did come up. 3. In the Burn a disc dialog box, type a name for your new disc. I did that.
Another box came up asking. How do you want to use this disc? Like a USB flash drive. With a CD/DVD player and I clicked onto the With a CD/DVD player.I then clicked onto next.A large empty box with nothing in it came up and a small block came up saying. Windows can't read the disc in drive D: Make sure that the disc uses a format that Windows recognizes. If the disc is unformatted, you need to format it before using it.From then on in I was stuffed because there were no formatting options to be seen. Any suggestions will be welcome although the thought crossed my mind that pherhaps I need to buy some CD-R discs but I thought I should use DVD discs.
I purchased a new 1TB harddrive to host Windows 7. The installation was without any problem. Prior to installation, I removed all harddrives, including another 1TB data backup harddrive.
When I installed the second drive, with all my important backed up data, it comes identified by Windows 7 as drive D: System Reserved. There are no contents despite the properties indicating about 40% used space. How can I get access to this drive?
my laptop has been acting strange recently and i cant seem to open or delete some folders , it tells me im not the proper owner. There is only 1 owner and 1 account on my latop and thats me , full admin.This problem started after fiddleing around with Media Center and sharing with my xbox. I couldnt resolve the problem so i have decided to use my recovery disc.I built the disc back when i recieved the laptop . The problem here is i dont know what exactly the process is to reinstall everything.Do i just insert the disc 1 by 1 and run them?
Is it possible to use the upgrade disc to format C drive (it has the Windows 7 RC activated, I can also reinstall Windows Vista if I have to), and do a clean install?
i have 3 pc's with windows 7 installed on all. i would like to format one of them so all memory is wiped clean but im wondering if there is a way of doing this without losing windows 7 or a way of getting windows 7 again after with no disc. the discs wernt supplied with all 3
My friend's Sony Vaio recently stopped working. It's displaying a black screen and the words "Operating system not found." I tried to do a system restore on it but half-way through it reported an error and aborted. Since a recovery disc wasn't provided or made, we bought one from a website provided by Neosmart.net and burned it onto a blank CD. The CD starts up but the problem is that it can't find the Windows 7 operating system. It was the only OS installed on the hard drive.
How can I do a system recovery without a disc ?In my drive D , there is something called " recovery " I guess it is a partition .But when I open up recovery manager , It asked me to insert a disc .
Just bought a ASUS laptop with 7 home premiun 64 bit on it. I do have a Windows 7 Pro installation disc that I have for my scratch built desktop. Can I use that disc to reinstall windows on the laptop if need be and just use the license # from the laptop and I assume microsoft will just turn off the added features of Pro??? or do I have to create that 4 dvd recovery disk?? Also if ya know this is a ASUS A53E that has a super multi DVD drive is that dual
My sister gave me her laptop to do some repairs. I have been working on this thing for more hours than I wish to admit (mostly scans running like the Ad-Ware scan that is now on hour 7). Between her, and her 2 kids using it its has too much going on that need to be removed.The Laptop has a Vista sticker on it but was upgrade and is running 7 Home Premium. She purchased it from her neighbor who she no longer associates with. So the odds of her getting the 7 Home Premium DVD from her are slim to none.I have went through and cleaned up most of the crap and am working on getting it to run a smooth as new (or better once de-crapped). can I create a restore disc once I get it to the point I am now that will be just as good as any restore disc?
I got a new laptop and it's full of crappy software, I'm lazy so I don't want to take the time to uninstall it. So I just want to do a clean install of windows, but the laptop didn't come with a recovery disk
New to the forums, kind of a novice with computers and I'm at a loss with what to do.Okay so my Acer Aspire 7551 running Windows 7 Premium Home 64bit was acting funny so I decided to do a system restore. So I put in the Acer Recovery Discs that I made when I first purchased the computer. Now I have used this discs before with no problems at all. So I put the first disc in, selected the option to do a complete system restore back to factory defaults. It's my understanding that this completely wipes the OS off the HDD. So the first disc ran with no problems. I put the second disc in and got an error message Fail to copy to HDD: D:PatchModulesWIncre.002WOP000460OX0TCB111.SWM Press OK to continue I press OK to continue, and it boots back to the BIOS screen. Then it goes to a black screen and says BOOTMGR IS MISSING. PRESS CTRL+ALT+DEL TO CONTINUE.So I put the recovery disc back in to try the process over again and same thing happens.
I am trying to install windows 7 onto my new ssd and i have a recovery flash drive it loads up fine but doesn't give me the option onto which partition im installing i have a hp dv7 that has two hard drives i have a healthy windows partion on my old hdd and my sdd i want to put the same copy of windows the files show up on the drive like it was installed correctly and shows mbr partion but doesn't bood (on ssd) also it partioned my 128 gb to 80gb partiion in the middle and 10 gb at beginning of unallocated space and the rest unallocated at the hopefully i have win 7 home premium i have the key but no disc of os just recovery flashdrive
cannot create a recovery disc in acer apire one - following all directions. Cannot get beyond eRecovery management - cannot click on a drive for the CD rom and cannot click on start.
My laptop suddenly decided to not run, it gets to "starting windows" but will not go any further. I`ve tried to boot from the OS disc to do a repair but it still goes to "starting windows". If i select "repair computer" at start up without the OS disc it stays at that window and will not go any further, I can`t even get an option when booting from OS disc to format and reload windows. The HDD is spinning so i know it`s getting power. I can run Linux live cd so i`m presuming it`s probably the HDD is fried even though it`s spinning. I even took ouit nthe HDD and connected it to my desktop but the desktop wouldn`t recognise it.
I have an HP G62 laptop which came pre-installed with Windows 7. I would like to fully remove all data on the HDD and reinstall Windows 7.The 'Computer' section of the Start button shows the following HDD (not sure if these are partitions or not, but I'm assuming that they are!):
Local Disk ( C: ) Recovery ( D: ) HP_TOOLS ( F: )
I had a quick look at the D: drive and it showed a few setup files, all of which seem to be related to MSOFFICE. :-?I have been reading about data destruction programs that will absolutely wipe the drive and remove all data; I would like to do this and then reinstall Windows 7 so that the laptop effectively becomes a 'new' one.
1. How do I go about formatting the HDD with a data destruction program and then reinstall Win 7, since I do not have a bootable disc?
2. How reliable are such data destruction programs? Is there any margin of error? (I am a bit concerned about all the sensitive information that I have saved on my laptop such as bank details, family photos, etc.)
