Date: 06/14/07 (Computer Help)    Keywords: security

I recently inherited a laptop that my late uncle (insert euphemism for "stole" here) from his old workplace.

It is running Windows 2000 Professional and seems to have a lot of added security measures to prevent the computer from being stolen (oh, the irony). The BIOS is even set so that I can't change the boot order and boot from my XP installation CD. Ergo, I don't think there's a way for me to boot from the CD.

When I run setup, it won't let me delete the main (and only) partition because it "has necessary setup files on it"- and I can't install on said partition because it already has Windows 2000 on it.

With that said, two questions:

1) When accessing WinXP setup while already logged in on Win2k, I have the option to "upgrade" instead of doing an advanced setup- but do I even want to do that, since it will keep the existing programs, settings, etc.?

2) Is there some other way to reformat this computer? I don't have the CD to restore it to factory settings.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/788091.html