Ive been given a Packard Bell LJ61 which has a 250gb hard drive. The machine has vista installed. I should imagine the machine has a recovery partition. How easy would it be to install windows 7 on it?? How easy would it be to delete the existing vista recovery partition and create a windows 7 recovery partition??? Is it even possible?? The machines specs: Packard Bell EasyNote LJ61-RB-110UK in excellent condition CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor QL-64 GRAPHICS: ATI Mobility Radeon 3200 LCD: 17.3" 16:9 HD+ LED LCD MEMORY: 3GB DDR2 HDD: 250 GB HDD OPTICAL: DVD-Super Multi DL (DVD WRITER) WIRELESS: Packard Bell integrated 802.11b/g/Draft-N WLAN RJ45 GIGABIT ETHERNET PORT BUILT IN WEBCAM MEMORY CARD READER X4 USB 2.0 PORTS VIDEO OUT: VGA + HDMI Ant help or advice with this will be very much appreciated!!
"Ive been given a Packard Bell LJ61" - Why, couldn't you run fast enough? If it's running, you'll see the recovery partition in Disk Management. I've viewed the service manual and don't any mention of a recovery partition. Not sure if they were around in 2005. In my experience, any laptop with 32-bit Vista would also run Windows 7. Good luck with your new (old) toy.
I just looked at your specs and, on the surface, it appears your rig will run win 7 "if" no driver and/or BIOS issue arise during the clean install attempt. However, it almost sounds like you want to create (or re-create) an OEM style recovery partition and that may prove difficult to do IMHO. In addition, I'm not quite sure if you would want that recovery partition to be able to recover Vista, Win 7 or just act like a typical Win 7 recovery partition. So I looked at your owner's manual and it talks about having to activate a D2D function in the BIOS and using a diskette during the recovery partition creation process and I stopped reading at that point because it just didn't seem worth the effort on an older rig like yours. Anyway, my advice would be as follows: Google for anyone that has successfully done a clean install of Windows 7 with your specific rig (This will help to determine if there are any driver or BIOS issues) Create a system image of your current installation and store it externally (just in case you need to revert to Vista) If above is OK, do a clean install of Windows 7 (delete all existing partitions during the process and the Win 7 installer will create a standard recovery partition) Once your new Win 7 installation is determined to be stable, do a system image and store that externally as well. Forget trying to create (or recreate) any OEM recovery partition structure. You won't need it now. Good luck with your decision. my2cents
Right! Ive rebooted the laptop as I wanted to see what was what after a clean install, it took 20 mins as it reinstalled quite a bit of software. Its got all kinds of stuff I dont want or I dont need, McAfee (trial), Nero, Cyberlink player etc. I want to get rid of all this crap.As I said, ive got a spare 500gb 2.5 hdd that I want to install, hopefully using this as the main drive and using the existing 250gb as extra storage. That much bloatware on it, its unreal. Thanks Logikewl Smile I woman who gave me the laptop has also given me 4 back up dvds, all numbered 1,2,3 and 4
Hi guys, the laptops working fine, quite fast. However id like to restore it to factory settings before I mess around trying to install a new OS, Ive tried booting from the backup disc but it just loads into windows (vista). Thanks in advance guys
I'm confused - it looks like you already did a clean install, but if that were the case, you certainly wouldn't be asking about it now. I did a search on "manual" "handbook" "guide" and "quick start" - all I found was the 202 page Service Manual which addresses the hardware only, nothing about a clean install. I feel the best you can do is take a new (or reformatted) drive and go through all 4 dvds and see what that leaves you with.