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How do i reformat c: drive in winxp?

J

jagr10

Golden Member
Hi, I want to wipe my entire c drive clean an install winxp on it. It already has winxp and other stuff on it, but i want to start fresh over again. I installed winxp over it where it said it would delete everything and it didn't. All the desktop and shortcut stuff is gone, but i looked in windows explorer in the c drive and all the previous stuff is still there.

There used to be a way in previous OS where you could start the computer in msdos mode and type "format c:" and it would work, but i started the computer in msdos mode and it said it was a bad command. How do i do this?

thanks.
 
The XP CD is bootable, and you are able to partition and format during setup.
 
What John said or else obtain a windows 98 boot disk and then you can use dos and type: format:c, proceed with format, all data will be lost, YES!
 
Originally posted by: amdskip
What John said or else obtain a windows 98 boot disk and then you can use dos and type: format:c, proceed with format, all data will be lost, YES!
Click to expand...


Booting to WinXP CD works like a charm , depending on BIOS, you may have to set CD-ROM as first boot device initially.

 
thanks for the suggestions. I'll try them out. I think my floppy was set as the first boot so i might change that to cdrom and see if that helps. If not, i'll try downloading those disks as suggested. What a pain. It used to be so much easier with previous OS's. lol thanks.
 
Also unless your HD is quite small, I thoroughly recommend you format it with NTFS. It'll be faster, more secure and more stable than FAT32.
 
You can boot off a 98 boot disk in winxp. I have done it at least 3 times. However you cant reinstall doing it that way. Here is what to do.

1.
Boot off a win 98 boot disk to a:
make sure the boot disk has format on it.
format the drive
then restart the pc and go into the bios
change the boot sequence to cdrom
and let it rip

2. just put the xp cd in the cdrom and shut down the pc and restart it
change the boot sequence in bios to cdrom as first boot device
winxp will ask you what you want to do


I recommend using ntfs on xp. It is just way better. Good luck and take your time.
 
"Can't boot to a Win98 boot disk if WinXP was installed in NTFS format (and maybe even FAT)."

Why? perhaps if NTFS was used you wouldn't be able to read the drive but it'll still get loaded by the BIOS and all you're doing is formatting it not reading anything off it (it should just come up as C: and be unreadable like a floppy that hasn't been formatted or that was formatted in a Mac). And why would Win98 have any problems with FAT? (Win98 has large disk support)

Thorin
 
jagr10, creating and formating partitions with Windows XP is much easier than with junk operating systems like Windows 9x. Trust me on this one. It doesn't seem that way because it's new to you.
 
Yes, I used to think it was easier using boot disks and fdisk and all that, no more.
The WinXP bootable CD is a great thing, as are most things about XP (except that activation and one PC per license baloney)
 
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