How to Replace the Operating System of a Computer

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to replace the operating system of a computer. We're going to do this using a Microsoft Windows XP CD which I have right here. This is basically a, basically a XP CD that comes with Microsoft. You have to have one of this to do what I'm going to show you. So if you don't have one either from the person that you bought your computer from or the company; you'll need to go to the store and purchase a new license. Let's pop this into our computer. Now I'm going to install this into a virtual instance of a computer; you'll actually be doing this yourself on your actual computer. So with that CD in, I'm going to start up my virtual computer and this is the same as you basically and stop putting the CD into your CD drive and then turning the power on. It's going to boot to your CD drive and what you're going to see is a blue screen here that says Windows setup. Now what this has done is this is loading the Windows operating system setup files off of that CD Rom; as you can see here down at the bottom, it's going through each of the, the different Windows sub systems and is loading those into memories so that it can actually install the OS. This probably might take a little bit of time to load, so just let it run through its system until you get the next screen. Now after all of that data has loaded up, you're going to be presented with the welcome to setup screen. Now what we're going to do is we're going to replace the existing hard drive on the machine; nothing has been done yet; so it's important that you've; if you haven't made a backup of any information that you shut down your computer and go make a backup now. To do so, let's press the enter key and we're going to press F8 to say that we agree to their license. Now what you're going to see in the screen is a list of the partitions that are available. For each of those partitions as we want to wipe out the computer, you're going to select all the partitions there; I'm only showing unpartitioned space, but you may actually have several; select them and then press the D key and that is going to actually delete the partition and that when you get back to the screen right here, it will say unpartitioned space. Now by deleting a partition, you've actually performed, done an irreplaceable operation on the hard drive and all of the data has been lost at that point. So as again, make sure you have a backup. Once you have that down to unpartitioned space, just press the enter key and it's going to begin to install the operating system. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to replace an operating system."