help - deleted all the original partitions

i did a fresh install of vista and i deleted all three of my partions!!!! is there way to get them back? what did i lose by doing this?

will this effect the performance of the pc?

how many of you deleted the three original partitions?

 

There is no way to get them back unless you have factory recovery disks and are willing to use them again. No it wont effect your performance, you just wont be able to revert back using the recovery manager program or create more recovery disks.

 

What brand of laptop? I'm pretty sure if its a dell, you can call and request a new hard drive thats pre-partitioned. I've heard of members doing that in these forums.

 

The files you probably need for your clean install are the ones that are in the swsetup folder that you probably did not back up. Programs like quickplay, rhapsody, etc... would have been in there. You can download most of your drivers from HP.com but quickplay, HP advisor etc.. probably won't be on HP site. HP may be able to sell you recovery discs that would restore your notebook to factory settings.. but the problem is, they probably won't give you just the swsetup files. And once you do a clean install, those applications will be gone once more. Since you don't have these anymore, about the only thing you can do is try to get them from somebody who has a similar HP notebook.. Its over two gigs worth but you probably don't need all of them.. just the stuff that you can't readily download from HP.com

Most of that stuff is bloat ware anyways and you should be able to manage without that stuff.. in fact your machine should run faster. Stuff like HP advisor, roxio, rhapsody, and the infamous vongo.. which is nothing less then HP's own resurrecting virus/spyware if you ask me. The HP updater is generally not as reliable as windows update. The whole purpose of doing a clean install is to rid all those applications/bloat from the system resources and to have a cleaner registry. But if you really want to know what you really lost, its the stuff that was in your swsetup folder.. That is what you won't be able to replace that easily.

This is assuming your laptop is a HP.