Clean Uninstall Help Please

[nish]

Im thinking about wiping the hard drive and doing a clean install of windows xp home for performance reasons.

However I have noticed that the laptop im using has a small partition which has the software and driver utilities set up on.

Will it be best for me to wipe both the hard drive and the partition, delete the partition and put everything on the one drive?

Im using a laptop with

Mobile AMD Athlon XP1900+ 1.60GHZ
480 Ram
xp home version 2002 sp2

40gb hard drive
= C - 33.3gb D (recovery/partition) - 3.39


Doing my head in this!

Thanks again

[krusher]

If they are all out of date and you have the updated ones backed up and ready to install, then it should be safe to delete.

If in doubt, back it up

[Miz]

Did the laptop come with a manufacturer's Recovery or Restore disk? If so, it probably depends on that second partition to do its job.

Some computers...Compaq, for example...require the use of their recovery disks because of certain critical data on the harddrive (a BOMID and some BIOS data) the system requires in order to function.

While a format/install using a regular Microsoft Windows installation CD can work on such computers, it can turn out to be a lot of work and a lot of downloading stuff from the manufacturer, burning it to CD and taking it to the laptop.