help with formating xp

[Lopyswine]

okay i am trying to format my hard drive but xp keeps telling me that it can't lock the drive and that it is in use...

how can i restart my comp so that i am just in command prompt without xp so i can format..

i am not interested in saving anything i just want to completely format my drive...

 

[Lopyswine]

bump!

 

[bozo1]

Boot off the XP CD.

 

[Lopyswine]

okay so how do i boot from the cd?

 

[T2T III]

Originally posted by: Lopyswine
okay so how do i boot from the cd?

You have to get into the BIOS for your motherboard and select the CD-Rom as the first boot device. If you have your floppy or the hard drive defined as the first boot device, then you will need to change it to the CD-Rom. Once that has been done, as the PC starts to boot, you will see a message similar to: "Press any key to boot from CD." - Once you have pressed any key, you should be taken to the initial part of the installation process within a minute or so where you will then be able to follow the prompts and select the options for the installation.

The "boot from CD" option is also quite good if you need to repair an installation of XP. Once again, the process will walk you through the necessary steps once the boot has started.

Good luck!

 

[Lopyswine]

okay so please dont hit me...... how do i get into motherboard bios...

and once i am in there and load from cd can i format even though i am not in fat32??????


do i have to convert to fat32 first? if so how?

 

[Lopyswine]

allright i am having a lot of trouble here guys...

i am really desperate and looking for some help and you guys are the most reliable source i have found...

as of right now i have 60gigs in NTFS and i want to completely format it... get rid of it all... i need to start fresh with xp again.


so apparently i need to convert to fat32 then format???

how in the world do i do this???

how do i partion the hard drive because some other tech sites say i need to partions to separate fat32 partitions and format them individually......??? is this right?


also i reinstalled xp on top of itself and chose the fat32 option... this did nothing because it still did not let me format i got this mesage
"quit any disk uitilities or programs that are using this drive. make sure that no window is displaying the contents of the drive. then try again." what the hell does this mean..... here i go and have my entire hard drive in fat32 and i still can't format it??????


AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH what am i doing wrong?

basically i need one of you to post a very detailed step by step.... please dont assume that i know anything... the only thing i can do is boot from cd... thats all i KNOW i can do right now....



i am tired and going insane.....



just got a new video card and it works like a dream... if only i could get this drive formated, then i could be whole again....












AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Lopyswine]

bump

 

[Lopyswine]

bump

 

[Xtremetechie]

Have you tried using Fdisk?

 

[Lopyswine]

no

 

[Lopyswine]

boo flag on the play....

throwing the boo flag...

15 yards for not helping the newbie!!

 

[Xtremetechie]

Sorry dude Fell asleep,

Get a Win98 Boot disk, boot into dos, run Fdisk, follow the instructions to delete "Non-Dos partition", then recreate a primary partition which will be fat 32, then reboot and use the same boot disk, type Format C: at the prompt and your done. Later you can upgrade to NTFS if desired from the command line within a win32 shell.