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Does Windows XP professional need startup or boot disk to reformat?

J

JASANITY

Senior member
I was wondering if there is anyway to make a startup disk to reformat the hard drive before installing windows xp off of the cd. I tried the startup disk in the a drive, but it seems to just let you go to a basic dos prompt. I tried c:\ format c: to no avail. Does it automatically reformat the hard drive when you install it off of the cd?
 
just boot off the winxp cd (choose boot from cd-rom in the bios)

you can format to your heart's desire from there
 
I booted from my WinXP Pro CD and it let me Fdisk and format straight from there. Pretty cool.
 
For some reason I cannot boot from the CD -- I set it to boot CD first in BIOS and it goes right to HD to boot any way, skipping CDROM. ASUS P2B-F MB.
 


<< For some reason I cannot boot from the CD -- I set it to boot CD first in BIOS and it goes right to HD to boot any way, skipping CDROM. ASUS P2B-F MB. >>



you sure there's not a "press any key to boot from cd" screen that pops up? if so, you have to, well, press a key to make it boot from cd

otherwise, is it a burned copy of winxp? cause most of those aren't bootable unless you make them so (and it's illegal too) 🙂
 
I guess I figured it out. I have 2 hard drives (C and D) and a Zip drive that is "E" and the CDROM is "F" -- when I set it to CDROM boot first, it must be looking for the "D" drive first -- not the actual CDROM. It let me set it to boot from "F" and it worked BUT I could not format the hard drive and now I have a non-working "Windows" on the computer with XP Pro. At boot up it stops and asks which OS you want to use, Windows or Windows XP Pro dangit. It would not let me format that I could find. When I tried to delete thepartition on C, it would not let me becuase it said setup files were copied to that drive and it could not. What the heck do I do now ??????? I wanted a clean install dang it. If I find a way to delete it all and start over, will I have trouble activating (I did NOT activate thiis install). Argh.....
 
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