Reformatting Hard Drive Need Help??

[chille1972]

ok i have a WD 40gb hdd and had winxp home on it with the NTFS file system. Now i want to reformat it and put a fresh install of xp but i cant seem to reformat it.

right now i've got a wd 20gb running xp and the 40gb as back up.

can anyone tell me how i can get this done?

I also tried to format it by going into my comp then right clicking the drive and formatting but error came up saying somthing about disk utility using it or system somthing like that.

I also tried to use fdisk but i got wrong ms dos version.

can anyone help??

thanks

 

[TheOmegaCode]

Try formatting it after booting to an XP CD, I don't think MS will let you format if there are system files on the disk. Then again, I could be wrong...

 

[NogginBoink]

Right. The NT OSes won't let you format the drive out from under the OS. Which, all in all, is a good thing.

You can format and partition drives right in XP's text mode setup. Boot to the CD, when it asks where ya wanna install, nuke your partition(s), create new one(s), format with filesystem of your choice (yes, even native NTFS format!)

 

[igiveup]

Well, no it won't let you format it if you are using it, but in most cases it just asks if you want to schedule it at the next reboot. Kinda nice of it to ask huh?

Boot off of the cd, whack your partitions, create new ones and then reinstall. Or you can just keep your partitions and choose to format them.

 

[chille1972]

Ok i got it to format it then installed system files got to the reboot started and looped me back to the cd and the formatting option. I then changed bios setting to floppy first and the system kept booting to cd then i took the cd out and it didnt detect my hdd hooked the 20gb with the fresh xp install on it and everything works fine.

could my 40gb hdd be going bad? or does anyone see somthing i dont?