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Great Dell format guide! - Page 3

post #41 of 71
5/9/06 at 3:40pm

Thank you very much

I used your guide and worked perfectly .

One note for you that are novices like me is before you do this go to Dell's website and look up your device drivers and burn them to a disk b/c when I reloaded winxp Dellcd did not have all of my drivers on it. "I think when you buy a Dell now you can get the full back up cd with all on it". This meant I couldnt use my ethernet or wifi drivers. I was lucky enough to have another computer on hand downloaded them and put on. Got internet going and downloaded the rest. I made sure since I plan on doing this more regulary so I burned almost all my drivers to a disk. Next time instead a few hours it shouldnt take me more than a hour.
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post #42 of 71
5/16/06 at 3:31pm
people think dell puts lots of crap on the hardive but you can just unistall it so whats the need of formating?

yes formatting is god if you have too much spyware or just junk.
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post #43 of 71
6/1/06 at 7:25am
Just tried formatting my new Dell laptop... pretty horrible results. Went through and chose the large partition, windows setup alerted me to the fact that i'd lose all data, pressed F to format using NTFS (tried both quick and full) and it decides to format C: which is the media direct partition instead. The large partition was originally D: for some reason, however on choosing to format this partition for some reason it just formats C: then says it can't because "It may be damaged".
Has anyone else had this problem?
Windows installation is now corrupted... first day having my laptop!!
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post #44 of 71
6/7/06 at 10:36pm
is it safe to delete all the partitions on the hard drive? or should i leave the other 2? is there any benefit to keeping the other 2 paritions?
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post #45 of 71
6/8/06 at 6:00am
ummm @ bynj, it was yor fault, the computer formatted the wrong aptition. this was my first laptop, and was eerie of formattign it, but yea, its just the same as a regular desktop, all was perfect! all i done NOSintake was just format my largest partition (c:/) and yea, simple as that. i don't even bother with the dell media direct utility, cos i hardly own any media on cds. and when i do wathc movies on my laptop, i always ahve progs running , e.g download program / msn messenger. media direct sounds like a good progrma, but is wasteful. and i ahve also read that when this option is used, the laptops fans do not run.?
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post #46 of 71
6/10/06 at 1:13pm
I would like to add a small alteration here. After you install the OS, the first driver that you must install should be the Notebook System Software. This should precede any driver installation after installing the OS.

Then the
Chipset
Video
Audio
Network
Modem
Touchpad
Quickset
Any application in any order ......
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post #47 of 71
6/10/06 at 1:16pm
[Next time instead a few hours it shouldnt take me more than a hour. ]


What you can do is get urself a copy of ghost and burn an image of the fresh installation with all drivers, applications, settings, etc into a CD/DVD. Just re-image whenever required .... 1 hour?? nah! 20 mins max .... even faster if you store the image on a seperate partition on the hdd itself ....

SoulKeeper
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post #48 of 71
6/11/06 at 1:51am
but that would take more than a dvd disc?
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post #49 of 71
6/11/06 at 5:20am
it might take about 3 CD's, but shouldnt take more than a DVD. it doesnt put empty space into the image as it is.... all the empty space is replaced by a simple algorithm. Therefore, its just the data that it stores, but keeps a resord of empty spaces, so that when you re-image it, it restores the empty space back .....

SoulKeeper
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post #50 of 71
6/11/06 at 8:16pm
in regard to this question, say i am using norton ghsot as an example, when i take the image of the HDD. will it put the program norton ghost on the image aswell?
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post #51 of 71
6/11/06 at 11:58pm
Yes it will include whatever there is in the hdd at the time of creating the image. What u need to do is when you install Ghost for the first time, it will ask u to make a couple of boot floppies, using these floppies you can create any image even without the program installed in the hdd. Maybe you can create them on a friend's desktop and then uninstall the program from there.

Alternatively, what I use is Hiren's Boot Cd. Its an excellent boot CD and has a tons of tools including ghost. Boot from it, run ghost, and make the image. there is a tool called Drive Image in it. that is good too. you can get it from any of the p2p networks in the form of an iso file.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hiren.thanki/bootcd.html

SoulKeeper
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post #52 of 71
6/12/06 at 12:45am
wow, thats a great file to use, but how do i download it from that website u gave me? it sjut tells u wat is in that program.....
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post #53 of 71
6/12/06 at 12:51am
d/w, i found it off demonoid.com (my private tracker site), but u can jsut grab the torernt file off any site.
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post #54 of 71
6/12/06 at 11:51pm
when u use ghost and backup ur hd to a disk, do i just put that disk in and it will auto format/reinstall everything?
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post #55 of 71
6/13/06 at 8:44am
in the simplest form, just like how you use the disk to create an image, you will need to use ghost again to restore the same image.

There is a way, however, to create a bootable ghost CD. Information about that is available at the following links:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...00030611414425

http://ghost.radified.com/bootable_cd_dvd.htm

A lot more information is available when u google for this.

Enjoy!

SoulKeeper
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post #56 of 71
6/15/06 at 4:51pm
Thread Starter 
wow this thread is still active lol, reps anyone
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post #57 of 71
6/16/06 at 2:42am
How do you reformat entiredrive and delete all partitions?
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post #58 of 71
6/16/06 at 3:42am
Quote:
How do you reformat entiredrive and delete all partitions?
That should not be too difficult to do.

Boot from the Windoze CD and one of the screens will tell u to delete the partitions, the next one tells u to create new partitions and format them.

What I do is, boot form Hiren's CD, run Partition Magic, recreate the partitions as I want, then exit, then boot from Windoze CD, do a detailed format (that way I will also know any hdd errors, etc) and install win. I have got my own nLited Windoze version, so the whole process take a little less than 20 mins.

SoulKeeper
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post #59 of 71
7/25/06 at 9:14pm
what size should you make a windows media center edition partition if you plan to install MCE and only MCE to that partition and place your programs and data elsewhere?

for reference, my windows 2000 is 3 gigs in the WIN2KPRO folder and 1 gig in the "Documents and Settings" folder.
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post #60 of 71
8/7/06 at 11:39am
Dells should be formatted otu of exsistence
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