Author Topic: Reinstalling Windows..which partition?  (Read 936 times)

Reinstalling Windows..which partition?
« on: 23 January, 2018, 06:32:19 pm »
OK I decided to install my Win7 on the ex-works Dell.  I got it to boot from the CD drive, and ams now being asked where I want to install windows.

Disk 0 showing three partitions

1: System 350MB
2: Widows 222.7GB (Promary)
3: Recovery 500MB (OEM- Reserved)

Or I can go advance and format.  Should I reformat Partition 2 then reboot from the Win7 CD and install there, or will the install in partition 2 wipe the Win 10 anyway?
We are making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)

Feanor

  • It's mostly downhill from here.
Re: Reinstalling Windows..which partition?
« Reply #1 on: 23 January, 2018, 06:58:17 pm »
Go into the advanced options, and delete all the partitions.
It will then show as unpartitioned space.

Install to the unpartitioned space, and it will set up a default partitioning scheme and format them as required and just get on with it.

Re: Reinstalling Windows..which partition?
« Reply #2 on: 23 January, 2018, 07:13:27 pm »
Ok thanks I’ll (try to!) do that  :)
We are making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)

Re: Reinstalling Windows..which partition?
« Reply #3 on: 23 January, 2018, 08:37:07 pm »
Hmmm, well the install was ok, but now the laptop wireless adaptor has gone awol - “windows cannot detect any networking hardware”. The WiFi icon is lit, so who knows  :-\
We are making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)

Feanor

  • It's mostly downhill from here.
Re: Reinstalling Windows..which partition?
« Reply #4 on: 23 January, 2018, 09:06:01 pm »
Hmmm, well the install was ok, but now the laptop wireless adaptor has gone awol - “windows cannot detect any networking hardware”. The WiFi icon is lit, so who knows  :-\

The light is on because the wireless adapter is not disabled at hardware level; it's just that there's no driver installed for it so windows can't see it.

So you now need to go into Device Manager, and look for devices that are banged out.
They will have errors like 'no driver found' or similar.

These will be things like the wireless adapter, and perhaps other things too.
This is because the original windows disk doesn't know about these devices.

There are some different approaches to fix this:

1) Go to the laptop manufacturers website, and hunt down the driver packages you need, and install them.  You'll need another machine to download them, and copy them over on a USB stick;

2) In Device Manager, let it use Windows Update to find some drivers (the option may be called something like 'search the Internet for drivers' or similar);

3) Use the chipset manufacturers generic drivers ( last resort ).






Re: Reinstalling Windows..which partition?
« Reply #5 on: 24 January, 2018, 10:16:50 am »
Cool, found an ethernet driver on the Dell site, and managed to install that. Now I can use the internet connection to hopefully find all the others!

Even better I discovered you can search by service tag number for the best drivers.
We are making a New World (Paul Nash, 1918)