Semi-reformat questions

I realize that Southern Girl put together a fairly comprehensive guide on how to reformat, probally to avoid a crapload of posts about it but my question is a little different.

I haven't actually recieved my laptop but I gather that there is quite a bit of junkware included, which is why I ordered the OEM disk with my system.

Now I understand that there is a restore partition on the drive, nice for returning the computer to the EXACT "out of the box" setup. My fear is not being able to get back to that state when formatting.

My question is basically this .. is there a way to replace the "windows" partition with a clean fresh install WITHOUT damaging the restore, mediadirect, and diagnostic tool partitions? Can I sneak a fresh install in around all of the other tools, so that I could still just hit F11 and get the laptop back into it's "out of box" state?

I see you can burn the partition to DVD, problem being I only have a CD-RW/DVD-Rom drive on the system I ordered.

 

The diagnostics partition and MD shouldn't be affected to much as long as you don't delete the diagnostics partition. If you format, you will have to repair MD but that is fairly easy - again as long as you leave the diagnostics partition.


As for the restore partition, the only thing I know to do is to burn a copy of it. Since you can't do that option, you can always get a new HDD from Dell if something goes wrong.

The restore partition is very picky and does not like it when the XP partition has been formatted or any partition has been edited/deleted. MD is just picky about the boot code which doesn't cause problems with very many users.

 

could i possibly delete all of the information off the XP partition without formatting, and install onto it without actually formatting it or will this screw up the master boot record beyond repair?

that way the partition is basically the same just the data itself is different.

 

AFAIK, it is not possible. I haven't heard of any user that has sucessfully has done that and had the restore partition work.

Personally, I seriously doubt you will need the restore partition. If you are familiar with formatting, it is easy to do. All of the software that comes with your laptop is available for either downloard off of the site or on one of the discs.

If you really want to keep the restore partition, then you are going to have to do the add/remove software method and manually uninstall everything. Then get a good registry cleaner and clean any excess keys & folders. From there, follow the optimize guide (link in the format guide) and that will cut down some of the processes running.

 

ugh .. i wish you could throw in another $10 to get the DVD player install stuff like cyberlink and sonic and what not .. i hate having to call in and ask for that stuff ... hate waiting for it to come in the mail even more

alas, yea I am quite familiar with reformatting .. done it many many many times (more than I want to count) on various PC's .. same deal on notebooks

thank you so much for your suggestions southern girl.