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Ok, so I followed Spike's guide to "Prevent infections by making windows more secure..." and Korrupt's "Tutorial: How to reformat your hard drive and install/reinstall Windows" (but not to a tee, I have a bit of experience doing so by myself).

After doing so, I discovered that all the hardware drivers (such as sound, graphics, etc) that come pre-installed on a Gateway 7510GX laptop were missing. This is the first time I did a complete C: wipe so I never encountered this problem. Times before this, I simply reinstalled windows or upgraded over the existing system. Everything was working fine (except for the missing sound and no ability for widescreen display) after the complete wipe and new installation of XP Pro SP2. This is when I followed through Spike's guide. After that I realized that I was missing drivers, obviously because of the sound, graphics, and inability to create internet connections or use wireless. So I fired up my dad's Vista laptop and downloaded the drivers from Gateway. There were 8 in total, I first installed the ATI driver, Marvell Yukon (LAN) driver, and the Conexant sound driver. I restarted, and things were going well. I then installed the remaining 5 drivers (motherboard ATI Catalyst, two Broadcom wireless drivers, media reader, and the AMD processor driver.) After these 5 installations, I restarted.

After the bootup screens, the screen got stuck on the Windows XP blue screen (before it shows the users). I waited several minutes before deciding to force restart. It happened again, and after waiting even longer I decided to reinstall Windows (I was getting frustrated, as I had homework to do). This took even longer than the first time I installed Windows, and after it was finished I logged into my main account which took about 4 minutes to load up windows. Upon loading the desktop I discovered that the wallpaper was gone (grey) and I got a warning that my C: drive was nearly full. I knew this couldn't be right, I just wiped the drive! So I went into My Computer, looked in the C: drive and instead of seeing the usual folders, the PC Angel factory reset drive showed up. Somehow, somewhere along the line, what used to be the D: drive swapped with the C: drive, so that all the windows files were in D: now and the recovery files were in C:, YET, apparently I am now running the system through the 5 Gig recovery partition. Everything runs extremely slow now because of this. I don't even understand how it is working, because I'm pretty sure there isn't enough space to install Windows on the recovery drive. I am very confused so if anybody can help me I would be very grateful.

Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management to see if you have success by exchanging the labels of the drives. Otherwise, It appears you are in for a format and reinstall.

Actually, I already did that. And it's back to getting stuck on the Windows blue screen again. I would hate to go through the reformatting again only to have this happen when I attempt to install the drivers. I'm wondering if I should just completely reformat the drive and get rid of the recovery partition... I don't have much use for the factory reset. As an advanced user I don't need Gateway/Best Buy holding my hand with all the crap they throw on there...