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davek456

51 Posts

1662

August 25th, 2006 16:00

New hard drive all lost - where do I begin to reinstall OS on Dell8400

I have a new hard drive and the CDs that came with the machine. I have a Dell8400 and want to restore the Partion Utility and the XP OS.  I have a CD marked XP from Dell, will that reformat, reinstall the partions and the partition utility or is there other software on a cd that I should look for and run first..
 
Thanks
 
Dave

funkinator830

1 Rookie

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68 Posts

August 25th, 2006 17:00

First you have to hook up your HD correctly (Look at your manual), then turn on your PC put in the Windows XP Re installation CD and a screen should come up saying press a button to boot from cd, then install it on your desiered HD, and format it (NTFS full) and complete the setup.

Denny Denham

2 Intern

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18.8K Posts

August 25th, 2006 17:00

DaveK456,

I'm not sure what you are referring to when you mention the "partition utility." When you reinstall XP using the Dell reinstallation CD (procedure here) you will end up with only Windows XP on the hard disk and as many partitions as you choose to create during the installation. Except for the partition containing XP, the others will be empty.

davek456

51 Posts

August 25th, 2006 18:00

Thanks for the reponses.

I do want to inclde the DOS partiiton with the partion Utility  That had some hardware troubleshooting utilities on it.

Are there instructions on how to include this partition?

Thanks

c0tt0n_CaNdy

1 Rookie

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63 Posts

August 25th, 2006 19:00

if your talking about the 32bit dell diags. i'm not familiar w/ any applications you can use to put the "utility partition" on a different partition, (hehehe). even if you use partition magic i'm not sure if that would work.
anyway. if you still have your resource cd. that has the diagnostics on it so you why put it on your harddisk. or you can download it from support.dell.com

RoHe

10 Elder

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44.3K Posts

August 26th, 2006 01:00

If you mean the Symantec PC Restore partition that hold the info to reset the system to exactly the way Dell shipped it, you can't reinstall that. Once you reformat a HD or replace it, PC Restore and all the image info are gone.

Set the HD controller to "RAID Autodetect/ATA" in BIOS setup before attempting to format the new HD and loading XP.

Ron

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