I Need Hard Drive Help

jmt604

Distinguished
Jun 18, 2009
2
0
18,510
The original hard drive in my computer over heated and "burned up". I purchased another and installed it. I can not find an option in the bios to format / partition the new drive. I'm not very computer savvy, but I thought I could handle this . Now I'm not so sure. Help!
 

Jerky_san

Distinguished
Apr 22, 2009
230
0
18,680
jmt604.. this is what you'll need to do.. first find the windows installation cd's that came with your computer.. If it is a windows XP machine you'll simply place the cd in the drive then restart the machine.. it will say "press any key to boot from cdrom" or something to that effect. You'll then go to a blue screen with white letters and go through the prompts.. You'll get to a screen that says shows partitions and you should have 1 giant one that you'll select and say "quick format NTSF". if its vista you'll do the same thing up till the screen that will be full color and just go through the prompts and select the partition and it will do the rest for you..
 

jmt604

Distinguished
Jun 18, 2009
2
0
18,510
I did try that. It is (was) a Dell machine running Vista. After I installed the new hard drive, I got to the bios and changed the boot order so t would boot from the CD/DVD Rom. Then I put the "reinstall" disk that came with the machine in the CD/DVD drive adn rebooted the machine. It came back with a message that there wasn't a bootable sector, and I could hit F1 to retry, F2 to go to bios, or F5 to abort. What should I try next?
 

Jerky_san

Distinguished
Apr 22, 2009
230
0
18,680
If it comes back saying that it means that it didn't see the cd that you placed to reinstall windows.. insure that it is in fact the correct cd and if it is.. see if you can specifically say that you want it to boot from THAT cd-rom.. What has happened if you want to know is that the bios has run through all the choices you gave it to boot from and since it ran out of choices it declares no bootable sectors found..
 

That is not a full copy of the OS, it is just the crappy recovery disk that is only any good as a drinks coaster.