System Reboot Without Disc?

[King C]

Yea, what it says in the title really. My sisters come back from Uni and seems to have misplaced her reboot disc and wants to clear everything before she gives her laptop to me. So are there any ways of rebooting the laptop without the disc?

Cheers people

king

EDIT: Oh yea and how?

Edited May 21, 2007 by kcchan

[poopipe]

you mean restore/recover dont you ?

in a word. Mostly

in a sentence. Yes, you'll be able to get windows on it but some things might not work. eg the Fn volume up&down keys or the funny little scrolly buttons on the touchpad.

you might be able to download an ISO of the recovery CD from somewhere - you can probably order one from the manufacturer.

given that you're confusing rebooting with restoring I'd recommend you try to get a recovery CD from the manufacturer

[King C]

Ok so we just want to return it to factory settings or whatever without the disc. So that theres files or documents and what not on it but it still has all the programs like Microsoft office etc.

[James-M]

...Baseball bat...

Edited May 21, 2007 by trials pie

[King C]

...Baseball bat...

yea i haven't tried that yet. Ill go do that now........

....NOT

[Danny]

As long as you have a std windows disk yes.

All the drivers for the touchpad etc will be available on the manufacturers site.

[King C]

Thats the thing, shes lost the windows disc. Shes got a Microsoft Office disc but shes lost the windows one.

[Danny]

Then no your out of luck.

[King C]

Oh well cheers anyway.

[python_man]

for a quicky round urs king ill dig out my windows disk

gotta clear mine again

nick

[Hendrix]

What's she trying to hide

I remember finding a site a while back with a Windows CD Basically on it. Unfortunately, a friend of mine did download it, and found himself out of a PC... he had quite a few viruses.

Sorry if this seems like no help.. just warning you against doing it

[Joe Sheehan!]

Cant you just FDISK it?

[King C]

What is this FDISC of which you speak?

[Joe Sheehan!]

What is this FDISC of which you speak?

Its something you enter into DOS to wipe the hard drive

I think its just FDISK you type in (make sure its FDISK not FDISC)

Im not sure if you need a cd for it to work though..

[King C]

I typed in fdisk and nothing happened. Why shouldnt I type in fdisc?

[Muel]

Don't format it! First you said that she had lost the boot disk, then you said she had lost the windows disk. These are different things, take it to a shop, explain the situation and they will be able to sort you out. If you have lost the windows disk, contact microsoft. I'm sure they have a system in place to deal with stuff like this happening.

But don't go typing fdisk until you have some advice from experienced computer geeks.

[SaltWaterHippo]

Fdisk is a really hard way to partition a computer unless you're experenced and I dont think he wants it partitioned, that will just create another disk virtually but drive C:\ with all the files e.t.c. will still be there. I think what he wants to do it format it (Wipe everything off the HD) then reinstall windows with office e.t.c. If you wanna do that and you've lost the disk then you could download it again and burn it, you just need to make sure you get the right version (Windows XP pro SP2 With Office) or whatever. You'll also need your CD key, You can download a program to tell you yours, you'll need to write it down. You just put the boot disk in and restart your computer, then follow the on screen commands. If theres loads of partitions just delete them all and create a new one with an NTFS filing system (It'll just say something like 'Create new NTFS partition'), once you have a new partition you can install Windows on it. It's not impossible to figure out, its like a linear set of instructions and form filling unless you're not computer illiterate.

It's the same disk that you use to format, partition, repair and install the OS. The 2 main disks you need will be the boot disk and the motherboard disk (what they are calling the manfucatures disk).

If you put the boot disk in, restart and windows boots up normally, then the primary boot device is probably set to the HD. To change it you wanna restart, at the POST screen (Black and white scrolling text) hit the key to enter your BISO (Del on the number pad normally works for me, If that dosnt work try F8). In the BISO you can go threw the menu and you'll see a list with 1st, 2nd, 3rd boot device, You want the 1st to be the CD drive and 2nd to be your hard disk.

After the reformat the computer will be just the way it was when it came out of the box.

If you dont get something you could PM me, If thats another language get a mate who knows what he/she is doing

[Tomm]

There should be a sticker on the bottom of the laptop with a Windows serial number on it. As long as you get the right version, you should be able to use someone else's install disk with your serial number. That would be legal.