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I have a laptop question.
I had a laptop which has died, I think it is virused to the hilt, it wont load up as the logon.exe is corrupt, now I am pretty sure the XP OS came pre-installed and is on the harddrive, so how on earth do I do a system wipe and reinstall windows as I cannot get into anything? Any advice appreciated as I just want to wipe it back to factory.
Anyone?......
Some laptops have akey you press before loading to get into a hidden diagnostic/repair utilty partition (F11 or F12) it may give a hint briefly on reboot.
Alternatively get an XP instal disk from someone and boot to that. Should work ok if you use a disk from the same version and the activatiuon code off the sticker on the laptop.
Get a copy of linux, either Ubuntu or Mandriva.
Both offer free downloads which can be burnt onto a CD and used to reboot the machine.
You'll be able to access all your old files and none of your existing viruses will run.
Your machine will probably run twice as fast as well.
Only problem you might have is if you're running specific Windows software - although a lot of software is available in Linux versions too.
using the XP disk that came with the computer..... (assumes you still have it)
insert the CD THEN start it up, it should boot from the CD rather than the hard drive unless youve messed around with bios (which is unlikely for 99% of users)
then choose the option to do a FULL reformat on everything and reinstall windows back to square 1
a quick reformat may not get rid of the problem, iirc, a quick refoormat just writes over the old files.
a full format writes 1s and then 0s in every "bit" to wipe it clean.
even then the little sods can hide in the RAM! but theres not a lot you can do about that.
whole process should take an hour or so iirc
I would Ubuntu it as above.
I'd also ubuntu it. But if I were going with windows I'd do as olly said, though the quick format is just a "del *.*", the format is a full resetting, either should work. I'd not worry about ones stuck in memory, the chances are it's just one of the millions of basic viruses (if one at all) that dont persist on reboot.
I have no CD the OS is pre-installed on the HDD (Some comapnies do this as it is cheaper than producing CD's they then just put the CD Key on a sticker on the back.... So linix... where can I download it?? there are lots of versions
http://www.linux.com/download_linux/
if you got no cd with the computer, upon startup there is an option to create a recovery disk
the option may even still be there?
if you download a illegal copy of windows, but have a legal cd key, is it illegal? (as you ahve proof of owning a lisence) and will it work?
you may be able to do it with a borrowed boot disk too?
dont know anything about linux sorry
it is legal, it is the preinstalledversion of XP, the CD key is printed on the laptop. From the boot up if I hit any of the F keys I can get into the options but none seem to help... I may just put a new OS on it and take it from there, im only after wiping the machine as I now have a base unit.