Assistance with OS Restore

[Guest]

I'm trying to restore an eMachines 750DVD computer for someone. It has had a
lot of unsupervised useby children, who were on the internet a lot. It's
currently running XP, Service Pack 2 installed, but it's riddled with all
sorts of adware, spyware, viruses from the internet. I therefore thought I'd
use the eMachines restore disk to erase the HD, re-install Windows ME, then
upgrade that to XP, using the XP Upgrade pack. However, the Restore disks
will not let me past an early point in the restore operation, stalling after
I respond Yes to the question on whether I want to proceed with erasing the
HD. I can get no response from eMachines, whose Technicla Support I have
contacted on a number of occasions this week (either side of Thanksgiving!).
If anyone on this forum can help, I'd be grateful as the machine is still a
very serviceable second machine.

 

[Nick Burns]

Make a 98 boot disk, boot off it and format c:. Then use the restore disk.
This will only work if the restore disk you have has the OS on it and not on
a hidden partition of the hard drive.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I'm trying to restore an eMachines 750DVD computer for someone. It has had a
lot of unsupervised useby children, who were on the internet a lot. It's
currently running XP, Service Pack 2 installed, but it's riddled with all
sorts of adware, spyware, viruses from the internet. I therefore thought I'd
use the eMachines restore disk to erase the HD, re-install Windows ME, then
upgrade that to XP, using the XP Upgrade pack. However, the Restore disks
will not let me past an early point in the restore operation, stalling after
I respond Yes to the question on whether I want to proceed with erasing the
HD.

Get hold of a ME or Win98 startup floppy, boot that (minimal) and run
FDISK
Use it to delete the existing partition with XP - the likelihood is that
those has been converted to NTFS, in which case use Delete non-DOS
partition

Your ME restore should then run, on the now-empty disk.

I'd have a XP SP2 CD to hand ready to run as first thing once the new
upgrade is done