Reforamatting Hard Drive

[jonmchugh]

Okay, I have a Toshiba Satellite A205-S5804 laptop. When I bought it at Best Buy, it had Windows Vista Home Premium installed. I then got a copy of XP Pro installed by a friend of mine on it. Now here is the thing, I want to reformat my hard drive because my computer has been running really crappy so i want to make it new again. My computer doesn't have Vista discs so what will happen if I format the hard drive? Will Vista already be installed or do I have to download all new drivers for Vista instead of the XP drivers. Or if I reformat the hdd will it automatically wipe out the XP drivers and restore it to the Vista drivers? Sorry if this doesn't make any sense. I just want to give Vista another shot. I only tried it for about a week before I had my buddy put XP back on.

Thanks for the help, Jon

 

[johnb35]

In order for him to put XP on he either had to setup a dual boot system or he would have had to get rid of the Vista to put on XP. There would have been no upgrade option to go from Vista to XP. Most likely you have no Vista operating system now. When you format the drive you will be left with no operating system whatsoever. If the guy deleted the recovery partition as well then there is no way to get back to Vista without buying a Vista cd. Your best bet is ask the guy what he did and go from there.

When he installed XP, was he able to get all the drivers installed so the laptop would work correctly for you? I just looked on Toshiba's site and it looks like they do have XP drivers for that model. Most likely you will need to buy an operating system, either XP or Vista.