[funkywaggnelz]

so I am selling my laptop and I tried to reinstall vista (home premium 32 bit) and put the reinstall disk in that comes with dells. I wanted to completely erase the hard drive and stuff and reinstall so it was like new. when I went through the discs guide all it did was install another instance of vista so instead of getting rid of my music, programs and other junk (that used like 32 gigs of my hdd) it like added it on top so now like 64 gigs are used on the hard drive.

how do i delete everything and reinstall like new?

[Trotter]

I would use GParted or KillDisk to wipe the drive, and then reinstall.

[kimsland]

The Dell Restore disc should have an option of doing a clean install, or remove the partitions, or full format
If you end up using free tool (like Gparted) to remove the partition, you may need to create a new clean partition so as the restore disc sees it correctly
Basically I had a Dell once that it would not clean Restore until I formatted first, generally though this should not be required