Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and beginning April 20th, 2021 (Eastern Time) the Yahoo Answers website will be in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.
Trending News
Experience re-formatting a Dell from scratch?
I have a Dell Inspiron 1720 that was running Vista. I upgraded to Win 7 and had some problems, so I tried to do a restore. However after upgrading I no longer can access the Dell factory restore ( the <F8> option). So I tried to use the restore disk, but that won't work either, it only goes so far and then stops. So now I have a $900 doorstop.
My real question is, has anyone had experience re-formatting a Dell from scratch, in other words, formatting the HD and installing a new OS w/o any of the Dell stuff? What if any are the issues? Should I keep the recovery partition?
Mean Green - that's what I tried to do. But the restore disk won't work and the 7 disk is only an upgrade. I'm actually thinking about going w/ XP since according to Dell my PC supports XP. Then I can upgrade to Win 7 again.
BTW- I believe my initial problems were w/ Dell cusomer experience junk in the first place - it wasn't supported by Win 7.
2 Answers
- Anonymous1 decade agoFavorite Answer
you just need a copy of windows to reformat your computer. when the computer boots up, change the setting so that it boots from the cd rom and u can reformat ur hard drive from there. you dont need any Dell things to do this. you can just leave the partitions alone, when u format hdd, the files get saved to program.old folder where u can retrieve most things from before the format.
- 1 decade ago
I am not sure, but I think the problem is that you have part Windows 7 and part Vista installed. So if you can use a Vista disk and reinstall that, then I think you will be able to use the restore disk to do what you want to do. And then when that is done you could use the Windows 7 disk to install it. It will take a while of course but you will have it with undamaged files that can be installed over with Windows 7. I don't think I would get rid of the recovery partition, at least until you see how Windows 7 is going to act on your computer. How does that sound?