Clean install

[Fred S]

I purchased a new PC and would now like to give my old PC to my nephew. It
had been upgraded from XP to Vista. I did a clean install with Vista and
deleted the windows.old folder which was taking up space but the computer
isn't as fast as it would be if I had formatted the drive before the install.
Can that be done with a Vista Upgrade disc or am I required to buy the full
program?

 

[Fred S]

Fantastic, Brink. I printed both then tutorial and the 'disk cleanup in
Vista' instructions and will work oin it shortly and hopefully my nephew will
gain the beefit of your knowldge.

When I did the upgrade from within Windows and didn't see an option to
format the drive I should have stopped and come to the Forum then. I guess my
brain missed that part. It would have saved me several hours of work which
are now wasted. Well, not wasted - I did learn something important.

Again many thanks.
Fred

 

[Fred S]

Hi Brink,

New problem. I adjusted the boot sequence but the machine won't boot from
the CD/DVD drive presumably because it is an external drive attached via USB
cable. I saw a 'test media failure' message flash by when it started with
this drive 1st in the boot sequence. Any suggestions on a workaround?

Thanks,
Fred

 

[Fred S]

Fred,

Check in the BIOS for options to enable the differnet USB options (Ex:
At Boot, Legacy, etc..) and enabled them.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Hi Shawn,

The Legacy USB Support was already enabled and there are no other USB
options. The boot sequence is: removable device, A, hard drive, ATAPI CD-ROM.
I even tried putting ATAPI 1st but of course that failed as the CD/DVD drive
isn't IDE. During bootup the LED on the CD/DVD drive flashes but it won't
start the installation.

Any other thoughts on this? If not, do you think it would be worthwhile
doing another clean install from within Windows?

Thanks,
Fred

 

[Fred S]

Fred,

Check in the BIOS for options to enable the differnet USB options (Ex:
At Boot, Legacy, etc..) and enabled them.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Hi Shawn,

The Legacy USB Support was already enabled and there are no other USB
options. The boot sequence is: removable device, A, hard drive, ATAPI CD-ROM.
I even tried putting ATAPI 1st but of course that failed as the CD/DVD drive
isn't IDE. During bootup the LED on the CD/DVD drive flashes but it won't
start the installation.

Any other thoughts on this? If not, do you think it would be worthwhile
doing another clean install from within Windows?

Thanks,
Fred

 

[Fred S]

Fred,

Well you would think that it would work with "Removable Device"
selected first in the boot order. Does the USB CD/DVD drive have a power
switch that needs to be turned on?

You could run the installation again from within Vista and select to
delete everything. If you do not have to much on there, you could just
uninstall/delete what you do not want on the computer for you nephew and
create him a new administrator account with his user name and delete
your user account from within his. That way you would not have to
reinstall everything again.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Shawn,

Yep - I too thought that "Removable Device" would work. I guess it's
possible that during bootup the system only recognizes IDE devices. I will do
the clean install again the way you have suggested. Fortunately I did not
install any software for him - that will be his job. I know he bought Norton
Antivirus 2008 which we will install when he has the computer. Many thanks
for all the help.

Fred