DescentBB

I need some help with a laptop:

My wife got a dell inspiron 1100 laptop from work with no system disks. They wanted her to erase everything from work, including the licenses to office and windows xp professional....so I bought a copy of win xp home and a office 2003 to set her up.
When I put in the windows home cd, it wouldnt allow me to delete the xp professional since I didnt have the administrator password.
So I chose to just install the xp home version, thinking it would overwrite the xp pro version.

However, after loading it and all the drivers, when I start the laptop up, it asks if I want to load home or pro. When I choose pro, it says it doesnt exist, home loads just fine.

Is there a way to get rid of the pro option there so that it will just start up?

Do I have to format the hd and load windows and the drivers again? and if so, how do I do that, since I obviously didnt do it right the first time?

There is only a cd drive, no floppy drive.


Thanks!

RM

FYI, the default administrator password for OEM installs is blank.

My suggestion is to boot off the XP home disk, and then make sure to format that partition before installing home.

Boot off the XP home CD, format the drive before the install, that will completely remove all previous versions of XP, all documents, and office from the computer.

right click on my computer and goto properties.

goto the advanced tab, and then \"startup and recovery\"

untick the \"display list of operating system for X seconds\" tickbox.


that's how it works in win2k, i imagine in winXP it's almost identical

I unticked the \"wait for x seconds to display starting os\" box, and you were right, it just starts up fine now. Thanks!
I dont think the xp pro OS is taking up any room, so I may just leave it as is.

It's frustrating not having the recovery disks because I'm just guessing on what hardware the laptop has...went to dell and did a search on inspiron 1100 and came up with some generic things, but even after loading all the drivers I could find, I still have a ? under \"other devices--Universal Serial Bus (USB) Controller\"

The usb ports work just fine...but its frustrating that I cant find a driver for this controller.

I think the only way to get recovery disks is to pay for them from dell ...when all I need is a list of the exact hardware this system has.

If I choose to reformat this drive, how do I go about doing that? put the xp home disk in and have it delete the partitions and then load windows?
when I tried that before, it wouldnt let me delete the xp pro partition because I dont have the admin password (it was set by her previous company IT people)...thanks for any help!

RM

Use a copy of DBAN on the drive if you wish to get rid of xp pro. DBAN doesn't ask for passwords and can wipe out all the hard drives in the system, so if you have drives/data you wish to keep, be careful.

that utility looks good. thanks for the link.
after I use this program, I can just boot off the win xp cd and load it fresh from there, right?

Correct. Just boot off the XP CD and let it create the partitions and format it to NTFS (quick) when it asks. Don't use a long format, takes forever and is largely useless (especially if you let DBAN run all the way through).