Hi,

I have just obtained a second hand Advent 1GHz laptop. It already had XP Pro installed and the disk had been converted to NTFS.

My problem is that an illegal copy of XP Pro has been loaded.

I thought I would format the disk and restore the original copy of XP Home from the OEM disks that were with the machine.

Q1 How do I format the disk? Of course it won't let me do it while it's actually using the disk. Can I do it from a floppy onto which I have copied format.com? I did try this but it couldn't see the C drive - is this because of the NT file system.

Q2 when I tried to re-install the OEM restore disks it wouldn't. I seem to recall a message saying that the copy I was trying to restore was older than the one one the hard drive. How can I force a re-install?

Many Thanks for any assistance
Neil

Hi and welcome to D-A-L

can you get into the BIOS and set it so it boots from CD first not the hard drive and format the drive then do a clean install

That's the way to do it! I must be losing it in my old age.

Many thanks for reminding me of the obvious

Neil