So what's the procedure? My nephew is having problems with his laptop and decided that he wants to wipe his computer clean and reinstall Vista (he has the Vista CD). From what he tells me he couldn't do a system restore, whenever he tried to reboot he received a blue screen error message. He isn't able to run any antivirus scans, I haven't been able to get them to work either unless I'm in safe mode. He already backed up his files to his thumb drive. So what's the process that I need to follow?
Just pop the Vista CD in and follow the on screen instructions. You'll need to reformat the partition first and then load Vista on there. That's it in a nutshell. It should guide you through it. I can't really explain it any other way than what I did up there.
Be sure to go into the BIOS and set the boot order to CD first. Meaning it will boot from the CD and not the hardrive. It will not work unless you do this.
Alright, I sat down to do this, I went into BIOS and changed the start order so that his CD drive was first and the hard drive was second. I saved the changes and it rebooted, but instead of reading the CD and installing, it booted windows normally. What went wrong?
when the computer boots it might say something like "press any key to boot from CD." if you don't press anything, it will boot off your hard drive and go straight to windows.
Nope, it doesn't say anything about pressing a key, it just starts up normally and doesn't even read the CD.
Well it turns out that his computer is a bit different, Gateway has a recover feature that allows you to reinstall the factory image with an option in the safe mode screen. All of that work with the CD for nothing. Thanks for the help guys, much appreciated.
master boot record errors... i can't fix them. i have a general idea how; but it's trial and error and i'm really getting pissed
