How do you do a clean install on a dell 2400 it has windows xp?

Question

I have a friend whos dell is full of viruses I rolled back the system to the earliest date and it still wont help ,I was told if you erace the hard drive and re install it would be better than if you just re run the program .Any advice ?

Answer 1

First, you will need the XP installation CD. Dell usually ships with a few discs, like the System Recovery disc. You need to make sure that you have a disc from which you can install XP.

2nd, make backups of everything important. Burn all music, pictures, and movies to a CD. Find out where games are being saved and burn them to a disc also.

3rd, put the CD into the CD drive.

4th, reboot your computer. While your computer is booting up, you need to get into your BIOS. Somewhere on the black sceen with all of the gibberish, it should tell you what button to press to enter SETUP or BIOS. Usually though, you just hit the DELETE key, F1 key, or F2 key while the computer is booting.

5th, In BIOS, you need to change your "boot order." That is to say, you need to change the order in which you computer will try to boot from stuff. Instead of booting from the hard drive, your need it to boot from the CD drive.

6th, Save the BIOS changes, reboot, then "hit any key to boot from cd" when it tells you. From there on it's smooth sailing. Just follow the instructions on the screen.

You will need to change your boot order back, or it will keep trying to boot from the CD. Also, a quick-format will work just as good as a regular format, and it takes a LOT less time. Only do a regular format if you're afraid that the hard drive itself is having trouble.

Answer 2

Well this can get a bit technical. You can format the drive meaning you wipe everything off of it. To do this you can either

manually remove the hard drive from the PC and hook it up to yours with an IDE cable make it the slave. Then boot up your PC with the desired hard drive to be formated. Go to my computer, it should appear there. Right click the drive and select format.

The easiest way is to just get a hold of an XP CD and place it in the CD ROM of the computer you want to do a clean install on. Make sure the PC boots from your CD ROM first. To set this feature when the computer is booting up press "delete" button repeatedly until the configuration page appears. There under boot up you should be able to chose the CD ROM as your first boot choice. Now that you've booted up from the CD, just wait a while follow instructions and make sure when it asks to format the drive or not, chose to format. The rest is simple. After that you more than likely will have to visit DELL.com to re-download all the drivers, for your specific DELL model, so your devices such as network card, modem etc work.

Answer 3

Make backup and turn on PC with a Windows XP disc in CD drive.