Hard disk drive recovery c full - help!  

One thing I forgot to ask. Did your computer come with Win 7 installed or did you upgrade to 7 from XP or Vista? If you upgraded did you use an upgrade disk?

Hi,
I have noted what you suggested and all pictures, documents etc are saved on my external drive.

The laptop came with windows 7 installed, so it has not been upgraded.

I just shut my laptop down and restarted. The first black screen gave option of either F2 or F12, at this stage i did not hit either key. Then the next black screen appeared giving the option of windows 7 or windows 7 again - is that because the old one hasnt been removed? If I chose the top one it took me through to where i just log in to my laptop as a user, if i chose the windows 7 underneath it took me to another black screen with a list of options such as safemode, safemode with networking etc.

I don't know whether this is perhaps remains of what was happening before i reinstalled where i had the blue screen of death (i've heard it called) appear, this was the reason for my reinstallation in a desperate attempt to get rid.

I hope that helps. Thanks!

I'm going to take a guess and say that F2 will take you to your BIOS. I have a Dell Vostro 1520 and when I click F12 it give me a one-time boot option without having to go through the BIOS. Your machine might be something else (I mean, why would any manufacturer want to standardize what the function buttons do??? :) .) You could select one or the other and see where it takes you. You should be able to hit the ESC key to resume starting Windows normally once you see what the function keys do. Or there will be an option to cancel the function key and start Windows normally.

The fact that you have a 2nd black screen with an option to select 7 twice is probably a result of that bad reinstall and not deleting a partition or two. No big deal because a clean install will take care of that.

I'm going to send you a private message with some additional thoughts.

Oops ... just found out you can't receive PMs

How to use Dell Recovery, & how to order Recovery Disks.
Dell - Support

Hi,
With the operating system disk in - F2 gave me a pale blue screen with the Dell logo and a list in top left corner with:
settings, system config, video, security, performance, power management, post behaviour, wireless & maintenance and in the bottom left corner and button to either 'load defaults' or 'exit'.

F12 took me to a black screen with options:
Internal HDD, cd/dvd/cd-rw drive, onboard nic, BIOS setup or Diagnostics.

Which do i choose?

You're going to want to use the F12 option. That's the one-time boot menu. You can restart your computer, click F12, and wait for the options to appear. Open your disk drive, insert the Win 7 install disk, and close the tray. Now use your up/down arrows on the keyboard to select cd/dvd/cd-rw drive. Once it's highlighted you can hit the Enter key. You should hear the dvd drive start to whirr and whine and groan as it accesses the disk. Watch your screen carefully because you should get a prompt to "select any key to boot from cd" (or words to that effect.) When you see the prompt click once on any key (the space bar works nicely :) ) to confirm you really want to boot the machine from the disk drive. If you miss the prompt your machine will boot from the hard drive and you'll have to wait for it to go through the welcome screen etc before you can restart and try again.

Hi, I'm emailing from blackberry.
I've reached the point where it asks where do I want to install windows? Choices are:
Disk o partition 1, disk o partition 2 recovery, or disk o partition 3 OS.
Which shall I choose? Thanks

If I remember correctly you have a 39MB Healthy partition, a Recovery C: partition, and an OS D: partition. Couple of questions before proceeding.
1. Do the various partitions (Disk 0 Partition 1, etc) show up on their own separate line similar to:
Disk 0 Partition 1
Disk 0 Partition 2
Disk 0 Partition 3
2. Do they each show something called allocated space next to them (probably 39MB, 14.6GB, and I can't remember what the last partition was - maybe 200+GB?)
3. Can you use you keyboard up/down arrows to highlight one of the partitions and then get an option to delete it?

You'll want to delete all of those old partitions so you're left with one large partition equal to your entire hard drive called unallocated space. That's where you're going to eventually reinstall Windows 7. You don't want to install it on any existing partition, especially one called D:

I'm leaving work in about 10 minutes and heading home. I'll be away from a computer for about an hour and 15 minutes. Sorry for the interruption and delay.