Dell Reinstall Problem!

[GreenMachine]

I have my friends Dell laptop which has been totally eaten by over 2000 Trojans, no working explorer.exe etc. I want to reinstall/reformat but I cant i get an error after windows cd starts loading drivers and such. It says no hard drive however in the bios its there and if i do start up from the HDD windows xp loads but is too screwed to use. Cant use task manager or anything at all. So how am I suppose to reformat. I've tried everything I know how to do. The only think I can think of is maybe I need the exact install CD that came with the laptop. Ive been using two other windows xp home edition cds both say no HDD found or installed. Anyone know how to fix this? Thanks!!

 

[Hefemeister]

what laptop model is it?

If it has sata drives you would need the sata driver for it. Since it most likely does not have a floppy drive you would need to slipstream a xp install disk with the driver using nlite. Or get the origional install disk from dell.

 

[FlashDude]

Hefemeister is right its that there are limited sata drivers in the xp install cd's, however you could just try to use the recovery partition to format the drive and reinstall xp. on boot its ctrl + f11

 

[PH3N0M]

You can contact Dell support and they will send you a copy of the system restore disc.