The software required will more than likely be on a seperate partition of the hard drive. During the boot sequence, there will be some options at the bottom of the screen (usually) that will say something like 'press F10 to enter restore'. probably in Dells's own lingo. press the appropriate key at the appropriate time, and follow the system prompts as they appear. This will format the 'C' drive partition of the disk, but as you mention, data loss is not an issue.