Restore cd

[Guest]

I have purchased a second hand laptop from a friend. My question is:

I need to do a clean reinstall of windows xp home with a recovery disc.
Will I be able to reformat the hard drive using the restore disc or will I
have to reformat the drive first? The reason is that it originally was
pre-installed with xp home but they had installed then removed vista so there
is a lot of residual rubbish on the disc that I want to remove. I have only
been able in the past to remove this crap by doing a clean install. This is
the first time I have had to use a restore disc, previously I have used a xp
install disc.

Laptop is a fujitsu seimens 1.7GHz, 512 RAM, Sata 60GB hard drive, DVD-RAM
optical drive.

 

[David B.]

As the restore CD was created by Fujitsu, not Microsoft, they would be the
ones to ask. Why not just boot from the disk and see what happens?

 

[John John]

Stick the CD in and you will find out! In all likelihood the restore cd
will remove everything on the disk and even repartition it if it finds
the disk to have a different layout than when it left the factory. You
usually don't need to format anything when you use those cd's, the
formatting is part of the restoration and done automatically. The more
tame restore cd's will ask for a confirmation but others will do it will
little notice to the user!

John

 

[Guest]

I am going to do that but was wanting to be sure as to what happens when
restoring from a restore disc before proceding. I posted the question here
rather than at fujitsu because I prefer these newsgroups for their
information content. plus I only want to know what happens in advance of
using it.

 

[David B.]

Unless someone that frequents these groups has the same machine, you
probably won't receive an accurate answer as mfg's make their restore disks
differently, some have the ability to format or not, some you have no choice
but to loose everything.

 

[DL]

If the restore cd gives no option to retain old data, then it would be a
clean installation