I'm Confused...

Silly question. I have a restoration CD that will allow me to put my notebook back to Factory Settings. There are two CD's, one is the OS (Win. XP) and the other is "Application and Driver Recovery DVD". If don't erase my hard drive and simply use these CD's to restore my noteback back to when I first bought it...will it delete all my data and make it so that it can't be retrieved?

Also, I'm assuming that I install the OS CD first, then the drivers CD second, right?

Also, will a DVD-RW work on Windows XP? When I burned "dban" to a DVD, it shows up on my Windows 7 notebook but not my XP Pro notebook.
 
Nickerz said:
Silly question. I have a restoration CD that will allow me to put my notebook back to Factory Settings. There are two CD's, one is the OS (Win. XP) and the other is "Application and Driver Recovery DVD". If don't erase my hard drive and simply use these CD's to restore my noteback back to when I first bought it...will it delete all my data and make it so that it can't be retrieved?
Click to expand...
I obviously don't know about your machine (you may need to consult the documentation), but bootable recovery disks typically format (but do not erase) the hard drive before reinstalling Windows. With windows installed, install Eraser, then wipe the free space on the drive.

Nickerz said:
Also, I'm assuming that I install the OS CD first, then the drivers CD second, right?
Click to expand...
Yes.

Nickerz said:
Also, will a DVD-RW work on Windows XP? When I burned "dban" to a DVD, it shows up on my Windows 7 notebook but not my XP Pro notebook.
Click to expand...
That could be a number of things, but probably not the OS as such. What do you mean by "shows up"? Does it boot from the disk, which is what it's supposed to do?

David
 
It sounds like your BIOS is skipping the CD drive when booting. There should be a configurable option to change that in the BIOS. Some even allow you to pick at boot time (e.g. my Lenovo Laptop -- F12 at the boot screen)
 
I'd go with Joe's thought as the most likely cause, assuming that his (and my) interpretation of "shows up" is correct. But not all optical drives work with all flavours of media, and this is more likely to be true with an older machine. And drives and media (even top quality media) can be picky about whether they work with each other or not, even if they are supposed to. Hence my statement that there are a number of possible causes.

David
 
I've been trying to use DBan and have managed to download it onto a DVD R and have got it to start running by pressing the F12 option on start up and choosing the CD/DVD drive.

It starts to do something and then the following text appears:

Darik's Boot and Nuke 2.2.6 (beta) is starting.
Waiting for USB devices to register.......................... done
PCI (sysfs)


then it just stays like that! ....

am I doing something wrong?
 
Confused Tom said:
am I doing something wrong?
Click to expand...
Not necessarily. There are systems that DBAN will not work with, as the drivers in DBAN are just not compatible. DBAN is not supported, and has not been updated for a long time.

If you want to pursue this, please post in the separate DBAN forum, or in the DBAN forum on SourceForge, which is somewhat more active.

David
 
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