Ok, a good few months ago my dell pooter keeled over and died. Thinking it was terminal i bought a laptop and put the Dell away in the corner of the room.

I have been trying Linux on my sons old PC which is very good but lacks software that i need. That pooter has now terminally died so i got the Dell out again to see if it could be revived. I booted it up and hey presto it worked at a fashion! The mouse/keyboard didn't work and the hard drive was making clicking noises. I bought another hard drive and plugged it in, loaded the linux CD and hey presto all is working.

I think i would like to put windows back on the Dell but not sure if it will work straight from the CD. I still have the orig Windows back up CD so do i uninstall linux then on boot up run the XP CD? Should it all install as per normal? The thing is the recovery CD has no serial number so will it install ok?

Many thanks in advance.

[Edited on 17/2/08 by donut]

dell cds dont need licence numbers if installed on a intel motherboard, it wont ask for registration either.

start it from cd and remove all partitions and format in ntfs

[Edited on 17/2/08 by graememk]

Sometimes the install CD will look for a hidden partition on the drive which might prevent you from installing (that's how my HP is anyway) Give it a go - you've got nothing to lose anyway.

quote:

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Originally posted by RazMan
Sometimes the install CD will look for a hidden partition on the drive which might prevent you from installing (that's how my HP is anyway) Give it a go - you've got nothing to lose anyway.

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Great, i'll give it a go.

Cheers peeps!

Tried to boot to Dell/Windows Cd but it just boots to Linux Mint.

Any ideaz? i have no floppy to run F disc and i can't get to MSdos or at least i don't know how!

have you changed the boot order in the bios?

Cheers

Mark

Yep, changed that and all is well with the world. Linux completely gone now and up & running with windows.

Cheers peeps.