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Trying to wipe HD in Dell XPS 8500
I am trying to wipe a HD in a Dell XPS 8500 made in 2012.
My significant other did some foolish stuff and as a result I believe the best thing is to get a fresh install of Win 7. Last time I ever did a HD wipe/reinstall was back in the beginning of XP so I am pretty new to the changes with Win 7. I really do not know what he did because I didn't witness it. By the time I knew what had happened, he had the system at a DOS prompt. There is no ability to access stuff within Windows itself at this point. All I know is what he told me. He said he tried to create a back up of important stuff onto an external HD but said that the Factory Restore Dell program ended up putting that onto the internal HD. From everything that I have tried to do to wipe this system, I do not see any recovery stuff, nor do I see factory reset stuff on the CD that came with the system.
I have been following the recommended fix that has been repeatedly mentioned on this forum, but have been running into difficulty and I do not know why.
The link below I will refer to the steps because it provides handy images.
How To Install Windows 7 With Activation Step By Step. ~ techtips000
Ok, at Step 10, I click on Advanced. There are three partitions. I try to delete the largest and keep the other two. The largest becomes the default Dell unallocated.
Does this step just mark the HD for format to be done during the install process? Or is it supposed to take longer? Just wondering what to expect in order to determine if what is happening on that machine is normal.
I go on with setup and everything seems to be fine, for a while. The machine reboots a few times, until it gets to step 22, where it stops and refuses to go any further.
One of two things happen.
Black/white screen text saying Windows did not properly shut down... do you want to reboot normal, etc etc. I let it go and choose nothing so it boots normal.
A bit after start up, a window comes up
''The computer restarted unexpectedly, or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed. To install Windows, click OK to restart the computer and then restart the installation.''
After that the system reboots and goes right back to the error screen. The only way to stop that is to press F12 again and go through the whole thing once more.
So what am I supposed to do next? Should I delete all the partitions?
There was another pop up window at the beginning of running the install setup. It wanted me to choose Win 7 x86 or x64. I have tried this reinstall method after clicking each of those because I wasn't sure which one to pick.
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