JeremyP's Blog

My Dad has bought a new whizzy PC with a 3GHz P4 and 1Gb RAM (still not as good as the PowerMac I have on order). This has left him with a spare PC not doing anything but coincidentally his old PC was infested with some internet worm. So the plan was to reinstall Windows (I'd rather he used Linux, but never mind) thus wiping said worm into oblivion.

The first problem was that the install CD was WinXP and the computer obviously already has SP2 on it so you can't run setup from within Windows. You also can't reformat the disk because Windows is using it. So I decided to boot from the CD and do a new install.

I stuck the CD in the drive and rebooted. The PC took this completely in its stride and went straight into Windows XP - curses. I rebooted again and checked the BIOS settings. Aha, the computer was configured to boot from disk before CD ROM. I changed the settings around and rebooted. The PC took this completely in its stride and went straight into Windows XP. After trying this several times, I disabled booting from disk completely and rebooted. The computer asked me to put a proper disk in drive A, I pressed escape and it told me to "press any key to boot from CD". While I was looking for the "any" key (ha ha), it decided I was too slow and went straight into Windows XP.

The next time I was ready for it and got it to boot from the CD. I immediately deleted the NTFS partitions to keep that pesky operating system down (that'll fix it good) and I'm now installing a pristine copy of Windows XP.

Further updates as they happen.

Update

Disappointingly the installation process went very smoothly. It took a little while to get all the patches and SP2 on. The only hitch was doing the video card update. for some reason the computer thought it only knew 640x480 16 colour mode.