hi guys my mate just rang me, he is trying to format his girls laptop, its got vista 32 bit on it at the mo, but when he puts the vista disk in it wont give him the option to format, it just re-loads vista back onto the hard drive, he tried putting his xp pro disk in, yet when it comes to loading xp on, it says it cant find a hard drive ??????? any ideas guys thanks take care
Sounds like XP will need a compatible driver, and for Vista I'd suggest simply going into the recovery console first & formatting from command line.
What do you mean "just reloads vista back onto the hard drive"? What brand of laptop is this? This sounds like a recovery partition kicking into action.
hi guys kit the laptop is a dell, thats all i know, he just said he wants to format it but the vista disk that came with it just loads vistaover vista if you know what i mean, he just wants to format it and do a clean instalation, landy, he wont know how to do that m8, thanks guys take care
Krikkit is right. Dell have an automated recovery partition that you can only format with a full copy of the OS and not the recovery disc that they supply to the customer. I suppose they do it so you have to go to them if you want to install another OS on the PC/laptop, but it's very anoying that they don't give you a full OEM copy of the OS considering you have paid for it.
its a bloody nightmare, theres nowt he can do, he tried with departed but that cam up with error thanks anyway guys take care