My Sad Story With Mandriva...

[neddie]

all I can advice is never messing with things you cannot understand.

No no no, Scarecrow, that's terrible advice! Of course you should mess with things you don't understand, otherwise you'll never understand them! But it's good advice to back up important stuff before formatting your hard drive!

[Guest ..Nick..]

Putting the windows boot record back to MBR is fairly easy using a regular windows CD, but it seems that all he's got here is a set of recovery CD's.

I do not know what to suggest, because the whole problem report is totally contradicting (it starts with something like "I accidentally shot someone in the head" and goes on like that).

Since it's sure that your mom can get her windows data back by consulting the right person (at some fee, of course), all I can advice is never messing with things you cannot understand.

The funny part is she actually wanted me to try linux and btw she found her files on a flash drive, so now im getting a friend to give me his STANDARD XP install CD so ill use my CD key and im still woundering why wont the computer distributors give you the Standard, original XP cd and instead they give you their own.

 

since i have 3 Recovery CDs and an Regular XP cd is only 1

[ianw1974]

The recovery CD's put back everything for the hardware that it came with. This means XP, plus all the drivers, plus all other software apps that come with your nice new computer.

 

Using the XP CD alone, you'll find a lot of devices won't work immediately, and will require you getting the drivers to get things such as video card, network card, sound card, etc working. Oh, and you won't have any of the additional apps that the recovery CD's give you for that machine it came with. Not that this is a major problem anyhow.