Please Help

[Boyo]

Well I completed my first build and in short order screwed it all up on the software end. I installed Windows XP SP2 with all security updates and activations smoothly. All drivers went in fine, but then trying to install my virus and firewall screwed me. BitDefender install went bad, so started from scratch. ZoneAlarm Pro killed me.

Anyway, the real problem was when I did system restore I lost everything. Now I am trying to re-format my C:/ Drive, start over, but Windows won't let me. I keep getting an error message that I need to have a Utility stop reading the disk. I deleted everything I could, but to no avail.

How can I start from scartch? This is a complete mess. Anyone, please help.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Gparted LiveCD

I love this livecd.

 

[Boyo]

I read it, and I still don't know what the hell it is.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Its a livecd with the program Gparted on it. Once you boot the livecd, you can format, resize, and copy partitions. It supports a lot of popular linux filesystems like xfs, jfs, reiserfs, ext3 (even reiser4) and windows's ntfs filesystem too. So you can boot up with this livecd and reformat the ntfs partition in your case.

Do you know how to burn iso images?

 

[TeeJay1952]

Are you booting from XP cd? There should be no proccess running on a hard drive that is booted from cd.

 

[imported_Ned Flanders]

Typing 'format c:' from inside the command prompt won't let you reformat as windows can't format the drive it is currently on whilst it is loaded.
Either boot into a DOS enviroment (i.e NOT into windows AT ALL) and format, or boot into the Windows XP setup using your XP Disk and delete / remake your partitions from there.

 

[Boyo]

Thanks for the help guys. I was off-line so I couldn't respond back yesterday. I closed out everything, then was able to boot from the WinXP CD. I believe it was a WD Diagnostic program that was causing the problems.

Luckily I had almost nothing on the drive except drivers and a few apps, so the reinstall wasn't too bad. I'm back up and running smoothly......except for ZoneAlarm which keeps giving me the Windows warning message that it is not turned on. I may have to reinstall that for the third time....