My brother recently bought a new HP desktop PC so he wants to sell his old laptop (Compaq Presario 700, Windows XP Home Edition) and we both agreed we should do a full restore to completely wipe the hard drive clean to it's original slate and we have the original Compaq ''QuickRestore'' discs and for whatever reason, they're not working. There is three CD's and not a single scratch or mark on any of them. I've tried to run all three on the laptop and the only thing that happens is that the folder containing the discs files on it is what pops up and no actual setup occurs like it says on the little piece of paper that comes with the CD's.
C: Drive and it just filled up fragmented files to 95%. I've moved the pagefile to its own drive and added 4gigs more to almost 20 gigs on C. Here's what I did that may or may not have something to do with it. Yesterday I resized the drive that C is on and made four partitions each one for a particular person so that the files didn't get mixed.I used Norton Partition Magic and at the end of each task a window would pop up stating that I should make a new rescue disk
I just installed Windows XP Professional over Windows 2000 Professional but I would like to completely wipe my hard drive and just have Windows XP installed. Does anyone know of a program I can use to totally erase my hard drive and start overwith a clean drive? I used to use a FAT32 format but this computer uses NTFS.
I need some one to take me step by step "SLOWLY" and tell me how I can wipe my Hard Drive completely Clean, as if it was right out of the box.I am not all that bright when it comes to computers.But come on.How tough can it be, if you are taken through it one step at a time? Please don't use computer Lingo while holding my hand through this. Just tell me as simply as you can, how a computer browser type of person can do this task all by themselves.there has to be some one out there that wants to share the secret?I have a few buddies who do it all the time, and when I ask them how to do it.they just say, that it is to difficult to explain as if it is a Big Dark Secret.I would Love to be able to do it myself.can some body tell me the easiest way to do it?
i need to wipe my hard drive clean. I don't what anything left on it after the format. I want to sell it without operating system on it. I've tried to do this with the XP cd but it just installs a fresh copy of windows back on.
what is procedure and commands to wipe all data from harddrive? the currently installed os is windows 2000. its so badly infected with trojans( thanks kids!) that i am going to start anew and put better access limits on it.(take that guys). already have downloaded all data i want to keep and will be scanning it( before installing) with avast and other goodies i've downloaded.
I was running XP professional but got hacked or a virus and did a complete hard drive wipe out and then installed XP home. Now it does not find, or is having a conflict with, my ethernet controller, audio device, system management bus and VGA. I can probably download updated drivers for the other things if I can get it to load a driver for the ethernet, but since I can't, I am pretty well screwed. I would appreciate any help from anyone who is at all familiar with the Dell Dimension 2400.
i have a brand new computer from crappy MDG and they have alot of stuff that i cant seem to uninstall or remove and id like to change the opperating system. to be honest i would like to just completely remove xp from the hard drive without having to reformat, i just want a clean hard drive so i can do a completely fresh install of windows xp, is this possible?
I'm at my wits end. I was queried by my computer to clean up my hard drive because it was full. ( I wasn't downloading anything).This seemed very odd to me as I always clean up my hardrive regularly.I usually defrag my hardrive every few weeks and the last time I did it I had 29% free space. Now when I check it I have 0% free space and the hard drive has over 20000 fragmented files, I've never seen it look like this.I ran spyware and came back no threats.Something has filled up my hardrive unexplainable.I've tried a lot of things from system restore to chkdsk.
My hard drive crashed and I replaced it with a new 500G hard drive. I reloaded Windows XP and I'm using the new hard drive as my main drive. It only shows that I have 137G Total size of the drive. How do I get it see all of the 500G hard drive?
My girlfriend's laptop has had hardly any space on it for a long time. It's 120GB with about 105GB of useable space. After selecting all items (including hidden) in the C drive, and clicking properties, the collective size is 51GB. However, when I click properties on the C drive from 'My Computer' it says Used Space: 101GB. Free Space: 4.36GB. I don't know what happened to the other 54GB.I saw a similar problem on this site, and it was resolved by turning off system restore. I tried this and it only freed and extra 3 or so GB. This is a really frustrating problem and I haven't a clue what to do next.
I have an Acer Aspire notebook, w/ 37 gig hard drive partitioned into two drives. D (backup, archive) is 98% empty. C (everything else) is91% full. Windows NT will not let me defragment the heavily fragmented C partition for lack of minimum 15% free space on the drive. How can I go in and reasign the drive sizes, without dumping everything and reformating? I'm handy with a power tool, but computers frustrate me.
Dell 4500 with 256mb RAM 40 gB hard drive. Son tries to load game and system says not enough memory. Only 4gB free. I update ZA, Spybot, Adaware and Norton and run everything. Find 3 non-viral potential threats through NAV. update spywareblaster. Run diskcleanup and empty temp internet files. These are all things I do regularly (not every day but more than twice a wweek) and I backup to external drive once a month at least
I have a laptop which after I purchased it and installed my own backup utility and created an image. I then started my windows xp home eddition with the cd and went to the section to redo the partitions. I deleted the partion for the recovery however after doing so it is not shown as unpartiton space. The system should have 80 gb hard drive however the statement above the partion says only 75gb is available to use. This is the same total as on the control panel / disc management. How can I get XP to recognize the entire hard drive space?
I just did a partial run of BCwipe, just 2 scans, because I had to shut the computer down and now my hard drive is full!! Before using BCwipe, I had at least half of the drive free. What happend and what can I do now?
I have several thousand fragments of files from using system restore on Windows XP Professional that cannot be defragmented from my hard drive. I only have fifteen percent of free space left and that was after I removed several programs. Disk cleanup only heleped minimally.
Hi. My problem is similar to this one here http://forums.cnet.com/5208-12546_102-0.html?threadID=295044 Except I am not running Vista and don't have AOL on there. Also, I don't think my drive is actually full, or if it is, it's because of something that Sonic or Windows did.
I have a bunch of computers. This Dell laptop, Inspiron E1505, is one I primarily use to watch DVD's or online shows. There were a lot of programs installed, because I used to use it regularly, and then I loaned it to someone for about a year. It had very few files in terms of documents, pictures, music, or videos, because I had cleaned all that out before I loaned it to her, and I got a new laptop, and so only use this one to watch DVD's. Also, I should mention it has a fairly new DVD recorder because the old one died a few months back.
Sometimes I use this laptop to burn or copy disks, which is what I have been doing the past two days, using the program Sonic Digital Media LE v7, which came preinstalled. It was working fine copying dvd's (legal copies of ones I recorded myself) until yesterday, when it suddenly said that my hard drive was full and to free up "0 kb" in order to proceed.
When I close the program after this error, it gives me three crash messages (every time).
First one says MediaHub.exe application error. The instruction at "0x0035afd0" reference memory at "0x35171ae8". The memory could not be "written". Click on OK to terminate the program."
The next error is almost exactly the same but gives all the numbers as 0x00000000.
The third error is Microsoft Visual C++ RUntime Library Runtime Error! program: mediahub.exe R6025 - pure virtual function call.
At first, rebooting helped this problem, but then I got the error again. So I ran disk cleanup. It took a really long time and then the pc turned itself off. I turned it back on and it said that the pc had overheated because the fan vents were blocked. The vent is on the bottom, and was very dirty (possibly because my friend was a heavy smoker), so I wiped it off with a damp napkin. I rebooted and ran disk cleanup again. I was able to copy disks again until it gave me the error again. Every time I go to the C drive and check the disk free space, it gives me very little there, but I know that it's not because of any files I have on there.
Anyway, I also uninstalled all of the unimportant programs and deleted any extra files I could find. I want to run check disk, but I got an error message and it said it would run it next time I rebooted (that didn't help and check disk still didn't run, and still wouldn't run next time I tried it). I tried to run disk defragmenter, but it said I only had 5% hard drive space left and it needs 15%. I ran it anyway, and it seemed to work, and I was able to copy more disks.
Now I am getting that error message again.
I am running disk cleanup again, compressing old files, so we'll see if that works. I haven't tried System Restore yet, will try that one next. I really would rather not reinstall Windows.
I have spent a long time struggling with Windows over different errors, which all lead back to page file problems, which ultimately all led back to my RAM. I found this out after XP's system file went irreparably corrupt, when my hackintosh (installed on a different hard drive) started experiencing the same problems.Bad RAM has been removed, and I'm trying to reinstall XP. I formatted the drive using OSX's Disk Utility program, wrote zeros to the entire surface, and partitioned it in FAT32 (Disk Utility can not format to NTSC).When I use my CD to reinstall Windows, it does not read the full drive. It instead offers to install XP on a 130gb drive where my 640gb drive is. If I follow it through, it installs just fine, but it formats my 640gb drive to only have one usable NTSC partition of 130gb.The last time I attempted this, I removed every drive and storage device from my computer except for the 640gb drive and the same thing still happened.
Your hard drive is suddenly full and you are left wondering where did all my free space go? Now you must begin the task of deleting old files and folders to reclaim space but where do you start? In the past I would suggest manually checking the sizes of all of your folders so you know where to begin the hunt but now there is a great utility called WinDirStat that does the work for you. After inspecting a drive you are shown exactly how much data is in each folder, what file types are taking up the most space and even a visual representation of the files on your disk
This forum has been incredibly helpful, and now I must ask another "ignorant" question to maintain my computer loving insanity. I recently acquired a used laptop running XP Home. I use Pro for work, so I thought it wise to install Pro over the top of the the former owners' OS and thereby effectively delete his old files etc. Well, what I found was that Windows simply imported the old OS info right into the new install, leaving folders, files and programs I didn't want on the hard drive. So my question for you guys and gals is this. How do I destroy everything on my hard drive, then make the laptop (without floppy drive available), accept the reloading of my XP Pro CD? It is a full OEM version by the way. If I can format the HD, and have BIOS boot from CD-ROM, will I have a "fresh" CD-only install at that point, or will there still be little goblins of information running around in my system
Two weeks ago I installed win7 on my system,but 3 days ago,bacause of some problems,I decided to uninstall it and to setup an older version.But unfortunately I had many problems to setup another one.Although I had the related DVD in DVD drive,after some seonds it asked for the DVD labeled Win XP.Anyhow finally I could setup win XP 2002,but windows only recognizes drive C with capacity of 100GB and I don't have my other drives as before.For your information it's NTFS.I decided to setup Win7
Oem disc auto partions any hdd as 16GB os fat 32/D:\ drive NTFS raw. The Sony OEM disc(s) are pre sp1. What steps do I take to install and get the full 200 GB to bea recoginized correctly?
something really weird is happening to my pc.in my hard drive, with a size is 60 gb, i have a folder, inside my docs, that says that i have 42 gb of things. but when a look inside that folder there is nothing. i saw in each folder inside documents and setings and nothing.i saw in temps folders inside of windows folder and i ran the windows utility to clean up and mantainance of my hard drive and i got nothing as a result.i tried crap cleaner, and its usefull, but the problem persist. i dont have a lot of apps installed or mp3 org jpg, files, so i dont know how to start.
I use Cobian Backup to produce a zip-file containing all files and folders, except for temporary-folders (I added an exclude-filter), of my system.Before I can rely on this method, I need to find a way of restoring the 27 gb zip-file, which I store on a networked drive, easily. how booting up a laptop with a formatted harddrive, be able to access a network-drive and extract all the contents of the networked zip-file to the hard drive?
How do I do a restore to factory settings? The only thing I have been able to find is a system restore to an earlier date, could someone help me please?
I like to do a clean install of XP on the family computer.Its an older p3 933mhz 512meg system and its been running slow even after i did all the usual virus, spyware, reg, defrag scans.A lot of people have said I should do a fresh install of XP and it will help alot.The question is, how do I go about doing this?Do I need to format my Hard Disk first?How do I do that?I have a XP pro disk so I really just need to know how to wipe the Hard Disk clean before I install it.
I have an HP pavillion xf328 laptop and of late it refuses to boot.I could not sart it in safe mode or any of the other choices offered at stert-up. I finally got tire of it just repeatedly cycling through the first part of the boot cycle so I got out my power max floppy and reformatted the HD. Then I reinstalled XP pro. It worked fine for several start-ups and now just goes to a blue screen. Is hp somehow proprietary on how I have to 'restore' the system?
Home computer got too many virsuses to fix. Need to reformat hard drvie but our computer came preloaded with windows xp and no disks. Last time this happened had to spend $ at Best buy where we boutgh it for them to fix. They said the operating system is hidden somewhere i the system. Is there a way to extract this before I wipe out the drive? I can only start up in safe mode.
my computer is running slow, i can recieve email but not send, i cant restore back to another date so im told by bt and others to format my hard drive any tips as boyfriends says it has to go back to shop to do that.