Inspiron 1501 reformat?

[Spezi]

My son has a Dell Inspiron 1501 that came with Windows XP Media Edition.

I have the same computer and it came with Media Edition as well and it didn't take long to notice it was quite slow and bloated compared to my XP SP2 desktops.

I set my BIOS to boot from CD and then proceeded to wipe out all the partitions and did a clean install which was successful and the machine performs much better.

Now my dilemna is that on my son's machine that he managed to infest with trojans I wanted to do exactly the same thing yet the darn thing refuses to boot from the CD.

Somehow I want to get to a screen that allows me to wipe the hard drive clean so that I can install XP SP2 but I'm a bit baffled now as to how to pull that off if I can't boot from the SP2 disk.

Any suggestions?

 

[TriplexDread]

Have you managed to get into the BIOS and set to boot from cd-rom?

Remember once you have deleted the partitions and formatted you may have to install XP with another license key because your recovery disks that came with the computer will not have the full install on them. As far as i'm aware you can buy a separate key from the Microsoft website. How much they are i'm not sure

I forgot to mention. To install SP2 your machine will check to see if you have a valid key before it continues

 

[Ian]

If the Dell laptop is fairly recent, there might be a system restore partition on it that lets you restore the system without needing the CD.

To see if you have it, hold down control and keep pressing F11 as your computer turns on.

 

[Spezi]

My XP SP2 is what I want to install and I have a key for it.

I've gone into the BIOS and set it to boot from the CD ROM first yet it keeps going to the operating system partition on the hard drive that I haven't been able to delete.

The laptop is less than one year old and yes those came with restore partitions but that one it did allow me to delete.

If I must use the Media Edition I suppose I could live with it however I still want to start with a completely clean hard drive and it hasn't allowed me to delete the operating system partition which I want to do so I can reformat it.

 

[TriplexDread]

Try setting all boot devices to cd-rom

 

[Spezi]

Try setting all boot devices to cd-rom

That's not how this BIOS works.

It lists all the different items and all I can do is assign the item a number in the order that I want things to boot and I have it set to #1.

 

[JonJonPoPong]

I am having the same problem as the topic starter. I am trying to install windows 7 on a friends 1501 dell lap top and when I put the win 7 disc in, it wont boot from it.
I start up windows vista, put the win 7 disc inside and go to my computer check the dvd drive and it says the disc is empty, even though I have tried this disc on another friends lap top and it worked perfectly.
I can not figure out wtf is wrong. Its set to boot from the disc but it just wont, I know dell says the 1501 is not compatible with win 7 but I have googled and seen other people say they installed win 7 and got it going no problems, however I found this topic and one other online while googling where people had the same problem as me but no one ever posted a solution.

 

[TriplexDread]

JonJonPoPong

Ideally you need to start your own thread.

This thread is over 5years old now