FORMATTING

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

Someone reformatted my laptop for me....i backed up the hard drive by putting everything onto an external hard drive.....I now have a number of problems....A) NOTHING WORKS...B) CANNOT OPEN ANY PROGRAMMES I HAD ON EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE....It seems i am missing a number of drivers etc..........H E L P!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks evryone Irene
 
irene19607 said:
Someone reformatted my laptop for me....i backed up the hard drive by
putting everything onto an external hard drive.....I now have a
number of problems....A) NOTHING WORKS...B) CANNOT OPEN ANY
PROGRAMMES I HAD ON EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE....It seems i am missing a
number of drivers etc..........H E L P!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks evryone
Irene
Click to expand...

Well of course you can't! Dragging the program folders to another drive
isn't "backing up". You cannot merely drag program folders to another drive
and expect everything to work just as it was before! You need to reinstall
the applications from the original media. What you wanted to do was 'clone'
the drive which requires a third party application, such as PowerQuest's
Drive Image 7.

I can't help you with drivers - you will need to visit your laptop
manufacturer's website for those.
 
Hi,

.......A) NOTHING WORKS.

That's not too surprising, reformatting the drive erased it. Normally
you would need to reinstall all your programs after an erase, even if
you had the individual files on a backup drive. Just dragging the files
back won't reinstall the programs that used them originally, things like
the registration file doesn't know you've ever had other programs
installed, so you need to install all your programs again.

..........B) CANNOT OPEN ANY PROGRAMS I HAD ON EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE

You'll also find that most of your hardware doesn't work like it used to
either. More than likely there were newer versions of your drivers
before the disk erase that were also deleted during the reformat.

If you want to make your life a little easier, I'd suggest installing
and running a program named Belarc Advisor and printing out the results.
http://www.belarc.com/ Belarc will run a system wide look at
everything your box has inside and tell you the type of hardware you
have in there that you'll need drivers for.

A less painful direction might be trying to find an often furnished CD
that comes with your brand of laptop and see if you can do a system
restore back to the configuration it was in before you let someone play
with your toy.

---==X={}=X==---


Jim Self
AVIATION ANIMATION, the internet's largest depository.
http://avanimation.avsupport.com

Your only internet source for spiral staircase plans.
http://jself.com/stair/Stair.htm
 
Someone reformatted my laptop for me....i backed up the hard drive by putting everything onto an external hard drive.....I now have a number of problems....A) NOTHING WORKS...B) CANNOT OPEN ANY PROGRAMMES I HAD ON EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE....It seems i am missing a number of drivers etc..........H E L P!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks evryone Irene
Click to expand...

When installing Windows applications, you are doing much more than
putting files in the program directory. The installer usually makes
changes elsewhere in your system, such as the Registry. Simply
copying a program directory to another drive isn't going to work in
most cases.

You may be able to reinstall your applications to the same directory
in which you copied your partial backups. That could install all of
the extras that you missed the first time.

If it were my machine, though, I think I'd start over. Rebuilding
from scratch sounds a lot less painful to me than trying to repair
every application install.

Good luck,
Jeff
 
Back
Top