How to Install an Operating System on a Computer

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today, I'm going to show you how to install an operating system on your computer. Now, what you need in order to do this is an actual CD. This is a Windows XP CD, and this is the operating system that we're going to install. You'll get a lot of these, or you'll get one of these when you purchase a new computer. If you don't already have one, you're going to have to probably go to the store and buy one for it to be legally licensed. Now, take your CD and pop it into your computer with the computer turned off. Now, mine is on because I'm going to do this in a virtual machine. But you, yourself, will turn the computer off and pop your CD in and turn it on. And you'll get this Press Any Key to Boot From CD. So I press the space bar there. And it has told my computer to load the Windows setup screen. Now, what you're going to see here is this blue screen that says, "Windows Setup" on it, and it's going to run through and it's going to start loading all of the subsystems that are used by Windows during the install process. As you can see, down there at the bottom there, they're just flying through there. All these different systems it uses for the setup. Now, this is the actual setup screen. It's finished loading, and it says, "Welcome to Setup." It says, "To setup Windows now, press Enter." So let's press Enter. We're going to now press the F8 key to accept the Windows license. Now, this is the partitioning screen. You have to partition your hard drive in order to use the hard drive to store data. I already have two entries here showing. One is unpartitioned and one is partitioned. Now, it's important that you have partition space, that means that there might be data on the hard drive that you want to back out...back up rather. So the time is now to turn your computer off and go and back up any data that you need backed up. If not, and you do see a partitioned entry that doesn't say unpartitioned, then press the D key to delete it, and then press Enter, and then press the L key to confirm that. Now, once you see unpartitioned space, just select it, press enter, and that's going to take you to format the partition. Now, it should be noted that the moment you deleted that partition, all of the data on it was lost. So make sure you had a backup. Now, you're going to want to now format the drive using the NTFS system. You can use the quick system, but that won't scan your hard drive for problems while it's installing. So I suggest you use the long-term process. I'm going to actually go with the quick, but choose number three here. This is formatting our system now. And basically, what it's doing is it's going through the hard drive and it is preparing that hard drive to store Windows-based files. And that's what the NTFS file system is. Once the formatting is complete, it's going through the system now of actually copying the files to disk and installing the Windows operating system. My name is Dave Andrews, and I've just showed you how to install a new operating system."