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Formatting hard drive in XP Pro

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by airforceone42 1 view

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I have somehow managed to flub 3 installations of Win XP. Now everytime I boot up, I am greeted with 3 versions of XP to boot to. The more recent install ended up on my D Drive (I have 2 40 gig drives, one is partitioned in half). When I have thelocal drive designated as other than C, there seems to be trouble with some applications and of the 3 installs, 1 is on E and one is on D. I looked around on this site and on Microsoft's site but could not find this explained in layman terms. WhatI'm trying to do is clean both hard drives completely and start from scratch and install XP on my c drive so that when I boot up, I don't have 3 choices as well. When I tried to format the hard drives from the gui, Windows wouldn't let me format the D or C drive. I tried from the command prompt as well with the same results. I made a system disk after a half day of reading tech pages on how to do this in XP but the system disk didn't have the format command on it. So I tried a system disk Ihad when I used to use Windows M.E. but when I formatted that way, months ago, it was a pain in the arse when I installed XP. So, being at my wit's end, I'm hoping maybe somehow out there knows of a sure-fire, better way of simply wiping my disks clean so I can install a clean version of XP Pro.

I sincerely appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks again.

Joe
jburr@tampabay.rr.com
jburrrr@hotmail.com

9 replies

by thechas

To start over, you need to boot from the CD, or the floppy disk boot set.
You cannot format a drive with active Windows files from within Windows.

Start by backing up any important data files.

I boot from a W98 startup disk, (you can use yourMe floppy) run fdisk, and delete the drive partitions.
For more information, check out www.fdisk.com/fdisk

Then, boot from the Windows XP CD, and install XP onto drive C:

You can also boot from the XP CD, and choose to replace your existing instalation by installing to drive C: in the Windows folder.

Chas

by airforceone42

Thanks TheChas for your response. I apologize for waiting so long to get back about this one but I just got back from a deployment. Anyway - I did as you suggested, the pc is up and running faster than ever and I'm not greeted with 3 choices of XPupon bootup, only I'm stuck with the win install on drive D now and can't delete it. I've tried everything. But the way, I found a good site for boot disks: bootdisk.com. Thanks for your help sir.

Joe (jburr@tampabay.rr.com)

by ann777

Best option is to change the BIOS boot order and boot from the cd-rom. WinXP cd-rom is bootable and after running through the initial part of the setup, it will ask you if you want to use an existing directory or erase the current directories andeven gives the option of formatting (or quick formatting).

If you can boot to cd-rom first, then do a format through the WinXP cd, you will essentially get rid of the boot sectors that have all your versions of winxp, and you can later format your other partitions through the WInXP gui.

by ann777

Read the screens that come up ... much like WinNT, WinXP does include options to erase/delete any current OSes and freshly format.

by airforceone42

Thanks Anna777. I took your advice and everything is great with the pc only I couldn't delete the windows install on drive D (but at least it's not showing up when I boot up and the fresh install on drive C went smoothly). The computer is up and running faster than ever tho. Thanks for your reply and help. If you get a chance, check out bootdisk.com.

v/r

Joe (jburr@tampabay.rr.com)

by rtfm error

save yourself some time: if you are happy with at least one of the installations, boot into it, then find the boot.ini file (believe its hidden) in the boot partition, and just remove the links for the other installations. use disk manager to reformat the other partitions, and there ya go

nick

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