Proper way for a fresh install on Vista Laptop.

Cade

I see my laptop has some annoying malware on it and despite my best methods to get rid of whatever it is seems to stick around. Considering I got a lot of junk on my laptop and little space decided why not just format the thing and put everything back on there brand spanking new. I know formatting doesn't work on Vista like the old XP and I got a Recovery disk. I remember some months back I had to reinstall everything and it went easy enough.

Now though I try to do and restart the computer and everything and...nothing, it just starts up as usual with the recovery disk inside triggering no options to change or fix anything with the C drive.

I'm sure I'm missing the obvious and someone can probably point it out to me, either using the wrong disk or what but yeah the basic question is how do I basically format my C drive and use the disk I got to put everything back on again.

Isn't it suppose to be the recovery disk that can do that? Or am I missing a disk and getting that one mixed up with the recovery one. Tried looking around to see if anything like this was discussed before but couldn't find anything, if anyone has any answers I'd appreciate it.

wunderbar

it's likely that your laptop is just set to boot to the HDD first. when the computer is starting up look for boot options, or just go into the bios and change the boot order so it boots from the optical drive first.

Cade

That looks to have done it!

Thanks so much.

That leaves me wondering though, why did that option change in the first place? I certainly didn't do it as I never fool around in the BIOS and no one but me touches my laptop.