Reformatting help

[SubzeroDiabolos]

Drivers for what? To be honest i'd avoid all the drivers for now and get them from the internet, so you're sure you have the latest of everything.

[Tricen]

Drivers for what? To be honest i'd avoid all the drivers for now and get them from the internet, so you're sure you have the latest of everything.

My pc came with restore discs. There's the operating system, drivers, applications, sound restore, and DVD player restore cd.

[Isiolia]

There are different types of system restoration discs. Some are made to be booted from and restore everything to out-of-the-box condition. Others may include driver installs that you need to run separately, some will have an executable that will install them all, etc.

If you have a "drivers" CD then you can probably just install from there...somehow. The selection of discs you have sounds like a Dell package, but hard to say for sure. In that case, Dell's driver disc would have a web-browser (basically) that lets you click on drivers one at a time to install.

What tends to be more consistent is to just go to the support section of website for the OEM that made your PC, go to the drivers/downloads for your model, and download what you need from there. Or, for some (like video drivers, most of the time), you can go to the individual component manufacturer's page to get them.

[Tricen]

It's a gateway pc. I can't connect to the Internet or anything. Nothig wants to load at all. None of the CDs I put in do anything. Windows is installed and stuff, I'm at my desktop but I have no drivers loaded because the cd won't load

[Isiolia]

It's a gateway pc.

Oh. Ew. I'm sorry.

Gateways I've dealt with have had a driver installer that you'd just pick a driver from a list, tell it to install, have it do its thing, and repeat...

You can go to the Gateway site on another PC and copy things to flash drive or something if necessary. At least get the motherboard chipset, ethernet (if that's how you're connecting), and probably video driver to lessen annoyance...rest you should then be able to download directly on the PC.

[Tricen]

I don't know anything about pc stuff so idk what you are talking about lol. I am going to go to their site and dl the drivers I need if I knew which drivers they are

[Tricen]

Yeah it won't even pick up a flash drive

[bungiefan]

You punch the model number of your computer in on thier site and search for the driver set. Then download everything to a flash drive and use them on the machine you just reinstalled on. You should have actually done that before the reinstall.

There's no reason a USB flash drive shouldn't be recognized. They don't need driver installation nowadays.

[Tricen]

My pc won't even register a floppy disc. I need to re reformat again or something.

[Shenrien]

;\ wow..

Reformat 101;

Place your Windows XP disk into your CD drive
on boot up it should give you the option to boot from CD
It should load up a blue screen, and at the bottom be loading a ton of files from the CD itself.

Eventually you'll be given the option to restore windows, press escape
you'll be taken to the partition screen, press D then Enter then L on the partition you want to reformat, do this to all of them that you want reformatted, then press C to create a new partition(NTFS, Long) because doing quit builds can fuck you up, at least I've had it happen to me so I don't take any chances.

Now windows will begin to install itself, follow all the proper procedures until it is fully installed.

Once you get to your Windows screen, get your internet up, and assuming your CD key is burned out get WPAkill so you don't keep being told 'authenticate your windows or we'll shut you down!' then get all your virus protection shit, your firefox and all your stuff back, then start getting your drivers for your motherboard, video card, sound card, usb ports/firewire ect. get your Java,Flash on and you should be back to when you first got/built your PC.

If you're a brand name PC owner, I suggest going to their website and downloading all the drivers that they give you, and when it comes to sound/video card you could probably go to who manufactured the hardware website and get a more up-to-date driver.

And now you're done

edit; also floppy is useless, get a flash drive 4GB Flashdrive

[Tricen]

Yeah except when it won't load any drivers at all or recognize USB ports or floppy discs.

[Norellicus]

It's likely that your system bus drivers aren't loaded, and that's preventing all the other things from interfacing.

Try this: right click My Computer, go to Manage. In the pane on the left, there will be an item that says Device Manager, click on it. A list of a bunch of system devices will come up, likely with a large number of them with yellow warning signs next to them. Press alt-printscreen to capture that screen with the device manager, open paint and hit paste to get a screencap of it, save it and get it up here, we can figure it out from that point.

Edit: Try to get as much of the device manager window visible as possible when you do the screen capture so we can see all the devices, if it still overlaps beyond the full screen point then take multiple to cover the overlap.

Edit 2: Erf, no internet. The above may not be possible. If it's not, then what you can do is look at that list and see what all your devices are called and then google that name for drivers. Assuming you can read CDs, you should be able to burn the drivers to cd and copy them over and install them that way.

[Tricen]

Installed Vista. Everything works now, yay now I get to DL WoW. D: