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Removing XP Home

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by robleese

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Our company is buying Dell laptops bundled with MS XP Home ed. We are wanting to delete the installation and load Windows 2000 Pro. Booting from the W2k CD, when the option to delete existing partitions comes up, we are able to delete C:\, but unable to delete two small partitions that appearently contain XP files; after installation, XP still appears as a boot option. How can these mysterious partitions be deleted?

4 replies

by zlitocook

You can use Delpart it was put out by Microsoft but you can find it all over the web. There are two partitions one is the dell partition used to load their files. Delpart will show you the partitions on the hard drive and give you the option to remove them. If you boot to a windows 95/98 boot disk and select delete non dos partition you should be able to remove them.

by ddr_dungeon

Well, I got XP home when I first got my computer, what I did was run Fdisk with a 98 boot disk. You have to delete the Back Up Drive (D Drive. Then you delete the main Drive (C Drive). After that just make a new partishtion, then format it. Throw the WIN 2k Pro disk in it and run setup! You might have to format with the Win 2K setup! That should do it though, sorry bad speller at some words!

by pesk, mbcs, mcse, mcitp, sts

this is a foolproof way of doing it, however, consider PartitionMagic to merge all partition and delete the WinXP partition. Then install W2K as usual. Make sure that the programs loaded are on a different drive/folder before deleting partitions. I still think, however, that FDISK is the best bet. Remember to run FORMAT C: /u (for unconditional) after restarting your PC after FDISK.

by toms45

Be careful deleting partitions unless you know what they're there for. Usually one of them is a diagnostics partition which may need in the future.

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