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How to format C

By rickporritt35 ·
I have win xp home and have decided for various reasons to format my H/D and load everything again. I can't remember the procedure having only formatted C once before.

The only boot disk (floppy) I have is a win ME one ( I couldn't find a create start-up disk option in XP?). I know I need to boot into DOS but don't know how to get there - I tried setting BIOS to boot from the ME start-up floppy and also the win XP CD but so far I'm lost!

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by rickporritt35 In reply to

Poster rated this answer.

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by TheChas In reply to How to format C

Looks like everything is in hand here.

What I do to clean a hard drive with XP on it is, boot from a W98 or Me startup disk (assuming the drive is under 120GB) then run fdisk and delete the partition.

I then boot up from the XP CD and partition the drive as desired as part of installing XP.

Keep in mind, that if your drive is a NTFS volume, you cannot access it from a DOS boot.

As to startup floppies, Microsoft did not include a startup disk utility.

You can create a DOS Boot Disk from either My Computer, or Windows Explorer.
(Right click on the A: drive)

To create a set of startup disks for XP, you need to download and run the startup disk creation utility from Microsoft.
There are 4 versions:
Home
Pro
With SP1
Without SP1

Chas

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by rickporritt35 In reply to

All of the above info is really useful - I'll keep for future use. As it happened someone rang me who was able to sort the problem. I've accepted all answers.

Thanks!

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by rickporritt35 In reply to How to format C

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