Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Mashimaro]

My comp kept freezing when it was starting up. At first I'd repair the original copy of xp using my cd. Later on even that stopped working so occasionally I'd have to reinstall completely. Now I have four copies of xp on my comp! how do I get rid of 3 of them. I believe 3 are on one hard drive and 1 on the other. I have finally backed up my important files so I'm not worried about reformatting etc.

Please Help!!

[tzechuk]

uh... reformat like you said??

[Mashimaro]

[the saint]

Sounds like you need to format the disk from scratch. If you have the original win xp disk then insert that and reboot and hit F2 when it starts up. In the BIOS find the boot menu and change the settings to boot from the CD. F10 to save settings and exit. This will boot from the Windows cd and wipe your hard disk clean. You WILL lose everything on the disk you format so you'd better be sure you have everything backed up and that includes drivers for anything on your comp.

Once you've done this, you will have a brand new Windows XP with nowt on it.

BTW though, it strikes me as unlikely that the original problem was caused by a faulty Windows installation so simply formatting the disk may not remove whatever caused it. It might ... but then again it might not...

[Mashimaro]

[the saint]

You also have video, internet and sound too no doubt
You need to right click on My Computer, Properties, Hardware, Device Manager. Play around in there and get down the names of all the hardware you have including hard drive, cd drive, network adapters, sound card etc You can double click these and look at driver details to find out what your system uses.

For each of these you should be able to get drivers from the company website usually in their support or download section. It might well be that Windows XP will install these drivers for you when you reformat but when I did it, everything but the network card worked. Problem was that without the network card driver, I couldn't connect to the net. You might want to download the drivers and put them on a CD as backup before you format.