Is there a way to manually reformat a four year old Compaq Presario?

Question

I have a freind, who cannot afford to buy a new system. Her system is well, not in the best "working order", if you know what I mean. I suspect it has viruses, and god knows what else. I know that on my system, I can do a system restore, and or to reformat, I hit the ALT, and F11 keys at the same time. Is this feature on her system, with it being four years old?

Answer 1

Best to have someone walk you through this, like a computer friend, as lots of mishaps can occur. You will need a computer and Compaq's recovery disks if available. Depending on your software version, go to programs, and look for Compaq's recovery application. First it will try to recover using backup data it made on the hidden partition. If that doesn't work, it will then notify you to insert the recovery disks, then do the work for you.
If you dont' have compaq's recovery diss, then tyou will need windows XP, CD's with the motherboard and peripheral drivers, and CD's from all the applications you want to reinstall. Format, then reload OS, then reinstall applications, then reconfigure.

Answer 2

You can reformat easily using DOS but you'll need an OS to put back on it once it's formatted. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then by all means, don't attempt it! good luck :-)

Answer 3

if you can boot from a system floppy, you can format the drive.

once it boots of the floppy, run

format c:

best 2 u

Answer 4

u need bootable disk of OS install through it with formating