How important is it to reformat when I get my 1505?

You might be able to get it working again... If you give a read thru Dan Goodell's site it will give you an idea of what you're in for...

Up to you as to whether the effort would be worth it....

Mark

 

That's up to you. To me, if you have the XP disc, there is no sense in backing up the partition, but I'm a hard-core user. I hate having any kind of junkware on my laptop, and any problems that I've had, have been fixed by repairing XP. So in my case, I don't have a need for the restore partition, but some users might like having it.

Someone had asked if they can move the partition to the end of the HDD, and if it would work. I was stating that as far as I know, it won't work. When you run the restore utility, it would detect that the HDD had change and will not restore your hdd.

 

Yes... that's my read as well [based on Dan Goodell's site]; He does provide some 'manual' methods in order to fix things if you do end up moving partitions around. PC Restore Partition - Troubleshooting

For me not worth the 'work' as I would never intend to use it...

Mark

 

I just got my E1505 today and as everyone else noticed all the "extra" junk on there. I would like to start fresh as well. Can someone tell me the step by step process of how to do this correctly? Or direct me to a post or site that has this already. I just don't want to screw up.

Thanks

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=42340

is a step by step guide for reinstalling XP on all Dell laptops. The only thing to be careful about is the Direct Media Partition, but I think the general consensus on this (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that you can get it to work by repairing it.

 

I thought we figured out that direct media was on the restore partition, or on the main partition.

Hmmm...this question comes up a lot. I see another sticky in the works, or an addendum to the one you already wrote.

I dont PLAN on using the restore feature. It is just that I've only ever formatted a hard drive one time, with a computer guru friend. I just want it to fall back on if I mess something up. Maybe I'll just leave it there for now, and six months down the road I can reformat it as a seperate drive and store data on it. Is there any reason that wouldn't be doable?

 

Reformatting down the road? You should be able to do that. XP is pretty easy to reformat, and walks you through most of it. Most of my sticky is the odd and ends on what to do afterwards.

As for the sticky on the Media Direct, I do cover it in my sticky. The problem is that I have seen 100% proof as to where it is at. Mark suggested that it was on another part of the partition. We've had users suggest that it is on the restore partition or the Diagnostics partition, so to me it seems like there isn't a general consensus on it. The only thing that I do know is that you should be able to repair the partition once you format, and that most users have deleted the restore partition, and was able to get Media Direct working.

 

I did this yesterday on my new 1705, not sure if the 1505 is partitioned the same way. I left the 40 meg partition alone and blew away the other two(5 gig and 70 something gig), loaded XP MCE and the drivers, then I ran the Media Direct repair utility and all is well with XP and Media Direct.

 

im confused, am i supposed to delete the windows partition too, leaving only the 40mb one? then start the reformat?. Also, about the drivers. Should i use my dell drivers cd or is tehre a place to download more up to date ones all at once. How do i update drivers as the years go by? can someone explain what network drivers are and how/why i need to install them first.

thank you

 

for one, supposedly you can delete all of the partitions, and then create a smaller partition first (think it has to be at least 1308mb). Then you can create your XP partition and any spare partitions partition that you need. Just make sure that the smaller one is first. Select the partition that you want XP to be on, and format and install XP in it.

You can use your drivers disc, but chances are that it won't be up to date or as current as what it is on the web. You can find the current drivers at support.dell.com

Your network drivers are what controls your wireless and ethernet card. Without these drivers, you will not have internet in most cases. If you want to download the drivers from the web, you need to install your network driver first so you can get access to the web. You'll either need to download your network driver before you format and save it to a jumpdrive, or you can install the network driver from the driver's disc.

 

does that mean i should delete all the partitions or can i leave the windows one and jsut reformat that?

 

To keep things 'simple'... I'd suggest leaving your partitions just the way they are and simply reformat the 'big' partition which currently holds your Win XP MCE OS.

If you think you need the hard drive space being used by the Dell System Restore partition, you could get rid of that one. Up to you. To keep things 'happy', I'd suggest leaving the Utility partition [the small one] alone.

Note... you will probably need to run the MediaDirect REPAIR utility once you're done.

hth

Mark

 

ok sounds good, thank you