Reformatting XP

[thefish8]

I am trying to reformat my windows drive, c:. I thought I could just reinstall XP, and it will ask me if I want to reformat. It never really gives me that option. It suggests to reformat other drives, but when I point to the c: it will just ask me if I want to overwrite the windows file. I want to basically wipe out that drive and have everything fresh. Any advise would be appreciated.

 

[nork]

What you could do is make yourself a win98 boot floppy, insert it, then boot up and go to the bios, set it so the first boot option is the floppy drive and reboot, it will go to a:\
Then use fdisk to clear everything off the drive, that is, to unformat, to take whatever partitions are on the drive off.
After that, take out the floppy, reboot to bios and set bios to boot to the cdrom as first boot option, put win xp cd in the cdrom and reboot. Then you can have win xp format the drive, fat32 or NTFS, win xp doesnt care, either one, never mind what others say.

 

[TooOne21]

FDISK

 

[newbiepcuser]

bootdisk dot com


all the tools you might need.

 

[joejoesan]

All you need to do is boot off of the XP CD. It will step you through the process to re-format and re-install. Just ignore the warning about an exsisting OS and re-format.

 

[cheap]

*Boot off windows XP CD

*At screen where it asks you where to install windows xp and you see a bunch of drives, read the whole screen, delete patition command is available, I belive it's letter 'D'. Use arrow keys to select "C:\" partition and press correct letter to delete that partition, confirm partition deletion with another letter from next screen, I believe it's 'L'. You're whole c drive is wiped now.

*Now you're back at drives screen, another command is available to create partition. Recreate partition you just deleted. When promted, pick NTFS over FAT32 system. It will format it automatically I think.

 

[sillyfresh]

Im trying to refromat my friends computer and he is also having the same problem. I put in the windows xp cd and go throught the steps but when i try to delete the partition it says the partition contains files necessary to install windows. also his dell didnt come with a floppy drive so i can not use a win98 bott disk. if anyone can help me with this problem i would be greatful. just need to get the computer to reformat the hard drive.

 

[lucky9]

Have you got a burner available? If so, download one of the "low-level format" programs from Maxtor or whoever and burn to a CD. I'm not sure if these will run from a CD ROM (the program) but if you can boot to the XP or whatever CD then it may be possible to run the LLF program from there. Then you can partition, format or whatever. It's very complex to make a boot CD. I think that the XP disk will allow this sort of thing.

Anybody know for sure?

I recently put together two systems for my kids and I gave up on formatting a HD from a CD. I didn't think (I was using ME, XP would do it) that it should be as difficult as it was. My way around it (I was using a used HD from my system I no longer needed) was to take my floppy out of my system and put it on theirs. I eventually went to PC Club and bought a floppy for each of their systems. Just too usefull.