P-6860FX reformat/reinstall

Been having a few issues with my new P-6860FX. It started with small freezes in Race Driver GRID. Reinstalling GRID and a defrag fixed that issue, but then a couple of days later all of a sudden I could not connect to my wireless router.

So after a bit of troubleshooting, I reboot and get an error message about one of the windows system files being corrupt. By then I was thinking I had a defective hard drive, so I booted with a Bart PE disc and ran CHKDSK on the disk.

It scanned and found a bunch of lost clusters and file problems but no bad sectors. So physically, the drive is OK but the file system was a bit scrambled. As soon as I rebooted into Vista, wireless internet was working again and all seemed to be well.

The next day I'm playing GRID for a while and then all of a sudden, the "mini-freeze" issue returns. I reboot into Bart PE, run CHKDSK, and sure enough, more file errors, same files as the first time.

Now I am thinking that the windows installation is botched and I will need to reformat/reinstall Vista. I actually have a Ghost image I took of the drive from the first day I had the laptop, after I had stripped most of the bloatware off and updated the drivers.

I could re-image it, but if I reformat/reinstall, will I have to go to Gateway's page to download the Vista 64 drivers? Or are they on one of the discs that came with the laptop?

 

Before formatting, you should create the recovery DVD via the Gateway Recovery program found in the Start Menu. This way, you can avoid downloading drivers.

 

thats the way to do it ^

 

Thanks guys. I did create a recovery DVD on the first day so I'm good to go there.