Re: How to do a Windows repair reinstall on a Toshiba laptop

System restore should work unless something has become corrupted.

The media supplied by Toshiba was only intended to restore the factory default configuration. There's nothing wrong with that, really, although it does include a lot of "crapware".

Alternatively, you can use a non-Toshiba generic retail or OEM copy of XP and start with a clean, freshly wiped disk. In most cases, if you get an OEM media, the Toshiba product key will work and activate as long as the version is the same (in the case of XP, version = Home, Pro or Media Center). Of course you will have to download and individually install of the the requisite drivers for the Toshiba laptop model in question, since most of these won't be present in generic non-Toshiba media.

Finally, the Toshiba installation leaves a complete (in some cases) or almost complete (in other cases) I386 folder on the hard drive. You can burn this to a CD, and then if you know what you are doing you can use it to do a generic installation of Windows only (without any other applications or "crapware") using the Toshiba version of Windows (e.g. the necessary drivers should already be present). However, this requires some knowledge of how Windows installation works, and it may require access to a non-Toshiba OEM media if you have a Toshiba media whose I386 folder is left [intentionally] incomplete (to prevent exactly what we are trying to do).


Barrabas wrote:
I'm considering options for an outlook express problem.
A fix might be to reinstall windows xp, but from the manual
the only way is to return to the factory condition, is there another way.
I might need this for something else one day anyway.
System restore never seems to work. I go back a couple of hours
and it says it cannot be restored.


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