Will Recovery Console allow this?

[Ronald Holder]

My task is to wipe the existing Windows 2000 installation on 10 PC's,
where there is a single 80 GB partition formatted NTFS.

On each system, I want to do a quick format of the partiton.
Allowing the drive to be reformatted in the setup procedure would take
way too long, due to the large size, and the quick option is not offered.

Can I boot from the Windows 2000 CD, hit F10 and C, enter
the admin password for the Windows 2000 installation,
and at the console prompt run

format C: /q

without encountering an error message that mounted drive cannot
be formatted, files are locked, etc.??

Has someone done this before?

Is there perhaps a better way to do this?

If I use a boot floppy and run DELPART, then have Setup create
a new 80 GB NTFS partition, wouldn't this take a long time too?

Thanks in advance for advice. Ther reason I am asking and not just
trying this is that it is at a site where I can't experiment on the PC's,
and we want to do the reinstall at a specific time.

Ronald Holder

 

[Leonard Severt [MSFT]]

My task is to wipe the existing Windows 2000 installation on 10 PC's,
where there is a single 80 GB partition formatted NTFS.

On each system, I want to do a quick format of the partiton.
Allowing the drive to be reformatted in the setup procedure would take
way too long, due to the large size, and the quick option is not offered.

Can I boot from the Windows 2000 CD, hit F10 and C, enter
the admin password for the Windows 2000 installation,
and at the console prompt run

format C: /q

without encountering an error message that mounted drive cannot
be formatted, files are locked, etc.??

Has someone done this before?

Is there perhaps a better way to do this?

If I use a boot floppy and run DELPART, then have Setup create
a new 80 GB NTFS partition, wouldn't this take a long time too?

Thanks in advance for advice. Ther reason I am asking and not just
trying this is that it is at a site where I can't experiment on the PC's,
and we want to do the reinstall at a specific time.

Ronald Holder

You can not format your OS drive in Recovery Console. You want to have
setup format the drive. It will not take long.

Leonard Severt

Windows 2000 Server Setup Team

 

[Ronald Holder]

Thanks for the prompt response, Leonard.

I will use a Win98 boot floppy disk and DELPART.EXE to delete
the existing partitions, then run Setup and create new partitions.

Ron Holder