I have a laptop that I bought from someone a while back that I want to reformat, and I don't have the disk for it.

Are there methods to reformat your computer without the disk?

of course

you'll need to get the ISO for the operating system and then make a USB flash drive into your install disk. the flash drive is something you'll need to google how to do.

you might also want to check to see if it has a restore partition.

go to start-> computer management -> storage -> disk management

For Windows, as long as you have or extract the Product Key you can download the ISO from Microsoft.

I don't see a "Restore Partition"



So in other words, I'll have to find the ISO on a website. Then google the flash drive part.

Don't have that :/

There are tools to extract Product Keys from a working installation on the web

This post was edited by bigbrd222 on Sep 3 2013 02:17pm

You can also burn the ISO to a CD or a DVD. It doesn't have to be a flash drive. Burning the ISO as a disk is much easier, and programs like imgburn are free (and, of course, legal) to use.

this^^^ except don't try to fit windows on a cd, use a dvd

I'm pretty sure imgburn would tell you that if you're using an ISO that's >700 MB that you need a DVD. But there are some unix distros that have divided ISO's so that you can burn across multiple disks. I remember doing CentOS server installs in 2004 with 5 disks.

yeah and there are linux distro's that fit on a single floppy. Of course anyone asking the question the OP asked is not going to be using anything like what you describe...Anything they are going to be using, won't fit on a CD; so you probably shouldn't tell them CDs or they might actually go out and buy em (remember how ignorant your audience is).

This post was edited by Azrad on Sep 3 2013 10:15pm