donna said:
i wont to restore the whole computer back to the day i got it but i
have no disk to do so
OEM vendors are required by their agreement with Microsoft to give you a
means of reinstalling, should it be necessary. They can do this in one of
three ways:
1. An OEM copy of Windows
2. A restore CD
3. A hidden partition on your drive, with restore information.
If you don't have 1 or 2, you should have 3, but you should contact your
vendor to find out.
Personally, I find both 2 and 3 unacceptable (especially 3; a hard drive
crash can leave you with nothing), and would never choose to buy a computer
that came with an operating system unless I got a complete generic
installation CD for that operating system.
i have a drivers and utilities disk and a via
sata raid driver floppy disk im curently on windows xp home sp2. ive
purchased windows xp pro disk i wont to use. am i able to restore the
whole computer useing these?if so how do i do this?
"*Restore* the whole computer"? You can't "restore" it, but assuming that
you mean you want to start from scratch, losing everything on the drive, and
do a clean reinstallation, yes.
Just boot from the Windows XP CD (change the BIOS boot order if necessary to
accomplish this) and follow the prompts for a clean installation (delete the
existing partition by pressing "D" when prompted, then create a new one).
You can find detailed instructions here:
http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html
or here
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/XPClean.htm
or here
http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/clean_install.htm