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Reformating old XP System partition

N

nwrigley

Senior member
I just bought and installed a new hard drive that I'm using as my new boot/OS drive. I kept my old XP install on the other hard drive in case there were something wrong with the new drive.

Now that I?m certain everything is working fine with the new drive/XP install, I'm ready to reformat my old XP drive in order to use it for storage. The XP Disk Management tool won't let me do this because it is a system drive, so I assume that I need to boot from the Windows XP disc to reformat the drive. I don't want to install a copy of XP on it though, is this a problem?

What?s the best way to reformat the older boot drive? Also, will my boot file be adjusted automatically to no longer detect this old OS install? It's difficult to find information about my particular situation, so thanks for any help.
 
Killdisk might work, I haven't used it (or read the link). If it doesn't or you want to try something else, you can just delete all the files on the old HD and then edit the boot.ini and get rid of the line telling the system that there's an extra OS to be found. I just did this the day before yesterday to help someone having a problem w/ their Dell laptop.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=888023

 
Killdisk really has nothing to do with my situation; it?s just a utility for completely wiping a hard drive.

FriedToast, thanks for the link, I appreciate it. My only problem is that the article doesn't include a step where the old partition is actually reformatted. I believe if you followed these steps Windows would still be using the boot.ini from the original XP install, but I don?t know for certain. Perhaps the steps where you save the boot file create a new one?

I need steps that assume the old drive will be unavailable altogether since I might end up removing it and putting it an external enclosure.
 
Originally posted by: nwrigley
Killdisk really has nothing to do with my situation; it?s just a utility for completely wiping a hard drive.
Click to expand...

Actually KillDisk does a lot more than that. But, anyway, by wiping the drive you will be able to format it from Disk Management which, as I understood it, was half your plight.
 
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