Please help me fix my comp

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hey,
ok, nothing works on my comp anymore. It is a brand new compaq presario and it is supposed to be really good. It refuses to play Baldurs Gate anymore, so I went and bought arcanum and it wont play that either!! I am going to the final measure, Im gonna totally reformat the comp and get rid of all traces of compaq on it. First of all, my comp was pre-partitioned into 2 drives, a 15.8GB drive and a 2.72GB drive. I have no idea how this adds up to the advertised '20.0GB' but I dont really care. I want to go back to one full usable drive with 20 gigs of space (or as close as I can get to that). I also want to know the easiest way to re-format my drive, the compaq tech support people are no help at all. If anyone here could help me with this I would be eternally gratefull.
--FenixStrife

 

How old is your puter, Cuase my Dell has a 3 year thing, if anything happenes to it in 3 years they fix it for free. call up compaq and see what they say

 

my comp is about 1 month old. I dont want compaq to fix it because I just want to have a standard comp and I dont want all of this compaq shit on it. which is why Im hoping to get help from here instead of using compaq's crap solution.
--FenixStrife

 

Ok reformating a computer is not an easy task. First you must make sure you have the drivers for all your components on floppies or cd (if you have a burner). CD drivers are especially important jsut in case. Next you need to make a win98 boot disk, i am assuming here your using win98. Then reboot the puter using the boot disk. Do not need cdrom support. Then type in format c: at the a:/ prompt..

push enter a few times and it will then erase all data on your c:/ drive. I personally recommend keeping the partition. It is good then you can keep all valuable files such as mp3's or drivers on the extra drive and reformat the c drive whenever needed. Next step is to reboot puter again with the win98 floppy. This time choose the start with cdrom support. Hopefully it will work with your cdrom, if not use the drivers that you previously saved. Put the Win98 cd in the drive.Next type e: , this should be your cd drive. Type setup once you have the e: prompt. This should begin the windows setup. You will have to load drivers after the installation.

This is about an hour to 2 hour process, and i cant stress enough the need to save all your drivers. Especially you network card or modem as you will want internet access

Hope that helps

 

Minsc thinks FenixStrife should add a '/s' to 'format c:'. Minsc thinks system files should be preserved.

 

It may not be a good idea to keep his system files if he wants to get rid of all "compaq shit" It's no problem to do a format without the system files, I've done it like a hundred times.


And I think that if you want to get rid of that partition you may need a program like partition magic or Fdisk

 

by the way, if you want to make partitions again, use partition magic 7.0, does miracles

 

Or *ahem* *cough* borrow the software from someone. BTA's undoubtedly right, as Compaq has a great liking for keeping everything of theirs proprietary.

On a normal computer, it is possible to boot from the CD-ROM. If you can get a second edition Win98 CD, that would make things easier for you. Unfortunately, your computer might not be set up to do that, and Compaq's BIOS is hard to get into and change (i.e., I don't remember how to do it... I hate Compaq anyway).

It would also be a good idea to keep a printout of what's on your system (sound card, modem, and the like). If you should be missing any drivers after the reinstall, this will make it about ten times easier to get them. If you can't find where to get the system information, go to http://www.belarc.com/Download.html and download their handy Advisor. The information this gives you is all you'll need and more. An excellent resource, IMHO.

EDIT: I said *NOTHING* about "borrowing" software, if Gweedo or anyone else asks.

[This message has been edited by Capstone (edited October 16, 2001).]

 

If you don't really know what you're doing or don't know anyone with knowledge, partitioning and formating are maybe not the smartest things to do.

 

When I bought my hp about a year ago, the first thing i did was to format it and get rid of everything that has to do with hp

I mean how can they reserve my desktop as an all time available ad space ? Also I couldn't uninstall some unnecessary microsoft stuff (i was tempted to use another word) it wouldn't let me. So, format baby !!

But of course i couldn't reinstall just windows cause their recovery cds practically just unzip an archive of files including everything that came with the computer and you have no say in what to install.

So I installed linux hehe and installed win98 that i had in an other partition later on.

Actually, you can boot the windows install program from cd only. But it's a good idea to backup your drivers in a floppy just in case.

PS: having more than one partition is useful. So that if something bad happens to one of your partitions, you have backups in the other one.

[This message has been edited by Invoker (edited October 16, 2001).]

 

Invoker is right. Keep the partitions in case one of them is messed up.

 

You say your HD space is 20 GB and you have two partitions, 15.8 and 2.72 GB. So somewhere 1,5 GB is lost

Use Fdisk and Format to go back to a HD without partitions, and then make the partitions again with Partition Magic 7.0.

I indeed would advice you to keep one partition to back up important things (like your BG-save )