any help would be fantastic,

i have a m8 that has a laptop with problems. its a dell inspiron 1720. his broardband provider said he had a 'botnet' on his system and shut down his broardband provider. his son has formatted it with a win98 disc (fuck knows why) and now it says it has not enough memory to run any set up discs.

im guessing that it is a partisioned disc and the win98 cd has formatted the smaller section and the memory is assigned to the bigger section.

i can speak 'tecky' and use laptops reinstall windows n stuff so dont think you will have to hold my hand through anything, just some good quality advice is required as i haven't used or fixed a dell before.

Thanks.

Rich.

 

no one know ???

 

I thought most windows install disc's had the option to remove patricians and format the drive?

 

Well firstly what version of windows was on it before the mong on the end of the broadband support line gave the epic line of "botnet" on your system and you should reinstall ? Secondly when booting of a windows 98 cd it will only see and allow access to fat and fat 32 partitions so if it had 98 or ME then it will see those partitions and allow you to format them and reinstall windows.

 

it was on vista home premium that came with the laptop.

so the win98 cd that was used to format the vista hdd has only formatted the first partition?

so if i can get my hands on an original vista cd and boot up from that, i will be able to see all the partitions and format the hdd corrently and install as usuall ???

 

I would download an ISO of Vista Home from a torrent site, and reinstall using his product key (Should be on the bottom of the laptop)??? That way its all nice an legit. Once booting from CD you can delete all partitions and do a fresh install.

 

Because the Dell website is so fucking helpful for tech support when you don't own the machine, I can't advise a great deal other then telling the son never to touch a pc again without learning about them. I would imagine that the laptop's hard drive was configured like most laptops and pc's are nowadays with a small section reserved for the restoration process. On bootup you can press a key to start the system recovery. I'm guessing this was done in a fat or fat 32 partition which windows 98 saw and formatted. Now, Windows 98 will categorically not run or install on that spec machine, hence the problem you was getting. This sadly leaves you a bit stuck with a laptop you can't use. Now, after a quick search in google I found this :
What is OEM?

OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer, and most often refers to the likes of Dell or Gateway.

So I would say that the laptop came bundled with an OEM version of Windows Vista, so that is what needs to go on it in order for the serial number on the laptop to work. Google images showed this so check what colour the s/n is under the laptop If you want more info on "aquiring" a solution do feel free to drop me a PM as software piracy discussion is not tolerated on this forum.

 

any copy of vista will work, they are all the same as its the key itself which unlocks the features within the os.

dont let the his son near another laptop ever again lol..