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How do you format a laptop?

B

bovinda

Senior member
I'm going to be reformatting my family's laptop tonight or tomorrow to get a bunch of gunk off it accumulated from never having a firewall up over the last year. Are there any important things to be aware of when formatting a laptop (or any computer for that matter--I've never done it)?

This laptop was bought from HP. Will I most likely have to put a completely new version of Windows XP on there? (I doubt HP included a copy of the OS with their disks, but I will ask my family tonight.)

Sorry if these are dumb questions. I just wanted to be safe rather than sorry. (And searches with "laptop" and "format" didn't pull much.) Thanks guys. :beer:

(Hey, while I'm at it, anyone got any good links to completely reformatting a computer?)
 
The only thing you *may* have to worry about would be finding drivers for some of the hardware depending on how old the laptop is. It used to be a real issue as they would use lots of proprietary hardware that required specific drivers that came on their "restore CD". Newer laptops don't seem to have as much of an issue with that. HP actually includes all the stuff to restore the computer on a hidden partition on the HD on their desktops. Not sure if they do the same with their laptops.
 
I wondered about that (the hidden partition thing). How might I find out if there is one on the computer? I can't see one under My Computer. Wouldn't it show up as a separate drive?
 
Nope.. they don't assign it a drive. What you have to do is right click on "My Computer" and go to "manage"... go to Disk Management and it'll be drive 0. You'll see one partition that has a letter assigned and possibly another partition that does not have a letter assigned. If you only see one partition that spans the whole disk, then you don't have a recovery partition. AFAIK, HP stopped providing recovery CD's with their computers quite some time ago, so my guess is that you're going to find a recovery partition. As I recall, there's an option at bootup to press a certain F-key (F-10 maybe?) to start the recovery process. Before it starts windows or anything.
 
When I got a Dell laptop a few months ago, I immediately reformatted to get rid of all the preinstalled crap. Dell did include a Windows CD, thought it had Dell labeling on it. I downloaded all the necessary drivers from Dell, burned them to a CD and booted up from the Windows CD. I deleted all the partitions and created one big one using the formatting utility that starts up as part of the install process. It's pretty much exactly like installing Windows XP on a desktop. Install the base OS and then the necessary drivers.
 
cryogenic666, do you know if it's possible a virus could hide in that partition? Like they can in the system restore feature of XP? If they can't, then I may just try to restore it. Completely clearing it off to get rid of all the preinstalled junk, as per DerKaiser's suggestion, is pretty appealing though. Would all the necessary drivers be available on HP's website, most likely?
 
I'd be willing to bet you can download all the necessary drivers from HPs site. At the Dell site, you can go to the download section and enter the model number. A page with all the drivers then pops up allowing easy downloading.

Do you know the model number?
 
in the past i found that hp does a decent job of providing all the drivers on their site. sony, on the other hand, did not, and when i blew away the restore partition, i lost my main way of getting those drivers back. fortunately, i knew someone else with the same machine.
 
You guys are right, it looks like it's really easy to find the drivers on HP's website--they have a link to them right on their main page. I'll check the model number when I get home from work today and try them out.

It seems like maybe the best thing is just to get rid of the partition and completely reinstall it then, just in case the virus might hide in it? I'll give it a try tonight. Thanks for the help you guys. :beer:
 
most important driver to have after reinstall = network (for your NIC) so you can connect to internet and get all your other drivers as you need them. if your going to burn a Cd though might as well get as many as you can and have it saved for the future.
 
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