Computer Problems

[Girospeck]

About a week ago, my computer started to crash after about 5 minutes. I already backed up everything important and don?t mind if I wipe the hard drive, but every time I try to reformat, the computer crashes about half the way through. I don?t care how, but I want to wipe the hard drive of absolutely everything. Can someone please give me detail instructions of how to go about this? I tried booting from CD and reformatted and repairing, both failed, also since I always crash in my operating system, it never works to do it there. At the moment, I can not really get in at all, in normal or in safe modes.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: Girospeck
About a week ago, my computer started to crash after about 5 minutes. I already backed up everything important and don?t mind if I wipe the hard drive, but every time I try to reformat, the computer crashes about half the way through. I don?t care how, but I want to wipe the hard drive of absolutely everything. Can someone please give me detail instructions of how to go about this? I tried booting from CD and reformatted and repairing, both failed, also since I always crash in my operating system, it never works to do it there. At the moment, I can not really get in at all, in normal or in safe modes.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Create a rescue disk. Make sure that fdisk is part of rescue disk.

Boot system off of floppy. Load up fdisk

Delete all the partitions. (Hopefully you only have one, in which case it would be a primary partition)

If not, you'd have to deal with extended partitions and logical drives.

Once your hard disk is just composed of free space (ie, no partitions defined) exist out of fdisk.

Reboot with your windows cd. Your windows cd will go about recreating partitions, formating and installing windows.

If you need help on how to create a rescue disk, what Windows OS version are you using?

 

[rumptis]

It sounds like you are having a hardware problem of some sort that is causing the crashes, wiping out the drive isn't going to fix this and if you are installing XP you can do a format in there that will wipe it clean.

Good Luck

 

[Girospeck]

It started a little while after i installed SP#2. I tried going back and it crashed during the recovery. Part of the problem was that there was no partitions on the drive, so its all just a big free one, that cannot be deleted. When i reformated a while ago, it seems like it just reinstalled it over the old one. Im wanted to completely wipe it.

 

[Girospeck]

also, thanks for all the help so far, i know it can be time consuming to help people online.

 

[rumptis]

During a clean install you can delete all Partitions I have never had any partitions I could delete. I'm not sure if this will help.

 

[Girospeck]

so, you suggest just booting up from CD, and going through the installation, then reinstall the operating system. That exactally what i did before, i didn't realize that things were on the computer from before until i looked at the C Drive, which was using 80 gigs from the install. I did a find, and looked for anything older then the day i reinstalled and a whole lot came up, i deleted all of it, and it worked fine for a while, now its messing up agian. I will try to reinstall it agian, the way i did before, and hope for the best unless someones got another solution or unless i dont understand what a clean install is and am talking about something different.

thanks.

 

[rogue1979]

Use a Win98 floppy to delete and create the partition. Also use the command "fdisk /mbr" to clear the master boot record. Then try to boot up on the Windows XP CD and format.

Make sure you aren't having a hardware problem like overheating, check the cpu temps.

 

[Xdreamer]

i agree with the hardware problem group check your temps

you can get really cool 3rd party bootable cds from Seagate and WD and Maxtor and such that will let you format your HD with out messing with dirty blinking floopys