i recently formatted my harddrive on one of my pc's,for a certain reason:hide: i cant get my hands on my backed up data,i have no os cd because my other pc's all came preloaded wi their os's from their manufacturer,any ideas on how to get dis pc up and running?thanks for ny replies....

did you format the OS hard drive or a storage hard drive?

I'm just asking cause I dunno if you can actually format the OS drive within the machine while windows is running. Unless you took the drive out and formated it on another machine?

If it's a storage drive,then you can try some file recovery programs,they can get most if not all your files back. If it is the OS drive,then I dunno if you can really do too much. Then again,I haven't really been in this situation myself either.

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emmm...i tink i formatted the os drive,although if thats not possible i obviously didnt...,well i cant get into windows so i cant see recovery programs being involved?...

More likely you'll need to reformat and do a fresh install. I imagine even if you didn't fully format the drive it'll be too gone for repair without an OS disk.

How to get an OS disk,that will be left to your own devices.....although the internet is a big ocean,and the fish are a plenty in some places. I just can't tell you where.

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Yeah about the only thing I can think of is if you can get a working copy of XP, then go into your bios and set your PC to boot from disc. If you can get it to boot into XP off disc, when it gets to the point where it asks you if you to want to install Windows on an existing partition, select no and format the partitions it shows currently. Then install a fresh copy of XP. Here's a step-by-step guide: Doing a Fresh Install of Windows XP, Step-By-Step - The Code Project - Work Issues

To boot into your bios, try holding delete at bootup. I have a Dell, on my PC it's F2.

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If I remember,Dells have their boot order menu on the F2,but they still have their bios menu on Delete. I think most other PC's have their boot order menu on F8....but I might be wrong. Their bios menu is still on delete though....just the boot order menu is different.

My mum still has a dimension 8200....but I haven't used it in awhile.

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tnx for dat,il try it 2moro bu for now im off to bed,il reply wi results when i try it

My Dell Bios was F2 btw, delete does nothing, F12 is the setup menu on mine.

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Tnx a lot man!it worked,

BIOS is on F2, Boot menu is on F12 for a dell and if you have another dell, sorry if you allready medtioned it i just skipped throught the forum. go to Dell Support - Technical Support, Drivers & Downloads, Troubleshooting, Product Manuals and Order Status and chat with a rep, they sent me a cd for free no shipping either, and you also have to get the Product key ( if the computer is a dell, it remebers the Pruduct key)