Ok, so I’ve rebooted from the Gateway cd, ostensibly wiping the dumb ol’ harddrive clean so as to start from scratch. Factory settings and whatnot.
All looked ok, but now, on startup, I have 2 little windows:
“Sysprep is working…”
(with a little hourglass turning over and over.)
and
“OEM Reset Reminder:
Preinstallation process in progress…Please wait”
These 2 little windows have been hanging out on the screen for roughly an hour now. Should I let them keep being there, or try restarting or something else?
It’s not a situation I’ve encountered, but Sysrep is a diagnostics tool that runs with Windows 2003 Professional. OEM is the hardware supplier, but in this case it is probably a diagnostic partition which either you don’t have, or is on a CD somewhere. This here link is a UK link, but does seem to fit your case.
This is the first time you’ve booted up this particular machine, yes?
(Read the post, Fred!) Ooops. You’ve reformatted the hard-drive. That probably means you’ve wiped the OEM partition, which normally you wouldn’t see. Um, got to go…
Naw…it’s the Gateway we’ve had for a couple or so years. I did a reinstall from the system disk, and this is the first boot following what appeared, otherwise, to be a successful reinstall.
Anyway, I went ahead and did things my own usual dumb way and just turned the thing off and rebooted. Now it seems ok. I just figured I might be aborting some kind of essential process, but I guess not.
