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Problem Reformatting

A

aplefka

Lifer
Okay, so I wanted to reformat both my boot drive and my storage drive, and I just used Partition Magic to erase the partitions on my storage drive, and I put in the XP Pro disc and went to full install and checked the box about letting the user select the partitions, but it wouldn't let me delete the boot disk partition, saying that files were copied to it that were necessary for the installation of the OS.

Now what I don't get is I figured okay, I'll let it finish this first install of Windows and then I'll reformat it after that and go directly from the CD so I can delete the partition. However, it just keeps booting up Windows now, instead of letting me boot from the disc and delete the partition. Please help me out, as this is really frustrating.
 
Do you have bootable Partition Magic cd disk, or floppy. If yes, boot with it and instead of just reformating drives, delete all partitions and recreate you primary and logical partitions over.
 
No I don't, but I'm sure I could create them since XP didn't reformat the drive. :|

Thing is, I didn't install the OS using PM8, I just put in the XP Pro disc and installed from there. Apparently I shouldn't have done that as now it's a huge mess.

There's no way I can do it normally without using PM8?
 
You should be able to install OS from bootable XP disk just fine also, by just doing Quick Reformat option (you do not need delete partitions). I am not sure why it did not work or why you can not boot from XP cd now. But if you can get PM8, just do what I said above, and than boot from your XP cd and do install.
 
You can partition your drive with your WinXP install CD. It'll ask you what partition you want to install it to. Just delete all the partitions there and then recreate them. Then you have to choose which partition you want Windows installed onto.
 
Well, I tried using Partition Magic 8 to install the OS and now all that happens when I restart is that it says NTLDR is missing, press ctrl + alt + delete to restart. This is so fvcking frustrating. I've never had this many problems reformatting and reinstalling an OS in my life.

The only reason I had to reformat was because I added a gig of RAM to my setup and XP said I had to reactivate, and when I went to reactivate it said the key had been used too many times. Such fvcking bullshit.
 
If I just take the drives out individually and reformat them one at a time in this computer, do you think that'd work?

I can't afford to be without a computer for more than the rest of today so please let me know.
 
If you are booting with Windows XP cd and getting NTLDR is missing, either your XP cd is not bootable or you did not set your BIOS to boot from cd. If your XP cd is not bootable, go to Bootdisk.com and download XP boot disks. If you have Win98 or WinMe boot disk, reformat you primary partition to Fat32 (you can convert it back to NTFS duaring WinXP setup) and boot from those disks and you can start XP setup under DOS running this file [Your CD Drive]:\i386\winnt.exe
 
Originally posted by: GoshaMaster
If you are booting with Windows XP cd and getting NTLDR is missing, either your XP cd is not bootable or you did not set your BIOS to boot from cd. If your XP cd is not bootable, go to Bootdisk.com and download XP boot disks. If you have Win98 or WinMe boot disk, reformat you primary partition to Fat32 (you can convert it back to NTFS duaring WinXP setup) and boot from those disks and you can start XP setup under DOS running this file [Your CD Drive]:\i386\winnt.exe
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