Restoring Windows XP after Darik's Boot and Nuke?

Well I have a problem. One of my desktop computer is horribly slow. It is invested with quite a bit of junk. Small viruses, trojans, pop ups, tooooons of wasted space, ect. On top of all of this, the desktop that I'm needing to wipe has not so much as even been defragmented or virus scanned since 2003 (or 2004?) .

But now onto what I need help on. The computer uses Windows XP. It has 2 hard drives built into it. One being the main drive (C:/) and the other being a built in system recovery/restore drive (D:/). I want to use DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) on the computer, but doing so will wipe both drives. That is bad. Because then I wouldn't be able to restore windows onto the computer because the recovery drive would be wiped and I'm 99.9% sure the computer didn't come with a Windows installation disk (because of the built in D drive).

Any help? I really would like to wipe the thing, but I'm not 100% sure how to. On top of that I wouldn't even begin to know how to get Windows back onto it. Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

Did it come with a recovery cd? You need some way to read the D drive to install XP again.

Why do you want to use DBAN? Why not just format?

 

No recovery CD was sent with it (that I remember). Reason being because of the BUILT-IN recovery drive... you wouldn't need a CD. All you do is hit F10 when you cut on the computer and it takes you to the system recovery menu.

I would reformat it... but I can't. My computer is wierd. In the system recovery/restore, all it does is "disable" all programs on your computer except the ones the computer came with. The programs are still very much installed and able to start back up, they are just in a frozen state (best way I can explain it). I can't wipe it and start over so I figured DBAN would be the answers to my prayers.

 

Weird indeed. You have to wonder, Why? Seems a bit pontless.

If there is no option to format when using F10 I am completely lost. WHY not mr maker?

You might be stuck without the xp cd. Did the computer come with a manual?

 

I'm trying to remember exactly how the computer was setup when I got it. If not mistaken, when you cut it on for the first time, the Windows XP setup automatically came up (actually I'm fairly sure that is how it worked).

So there is no XP cd. I just checked the pack I keep on my computer(s) things in (this includes any manuals to the computer... so YES I do have have a manual). I can look and see if it can help but I don't see how considering when they made the manual I doubt they had in mind somebody was going to 100% wipe the computer .

 

Alright. I looked over the manual and didn't notice anything that pretained to this. I'll look again later on to see if I missed anything or not. Still need some suggestions if anybody can help .

Oh, and somebody told me that I should "Back up your recovery drive to external media and then restore from it". But how would I go about doing that? I'm no computer genius if you haven't noticed yet lol.

 

Have you got a link to the actual computer maker and model? It's still weird.