F-Disk and a "clean install"?????

[Xantipis]

I want to do a clean installation of XP Home on a multi partitioned drive.
Is it best to remove the partitions THEN F-Disk, OR, F-Disk individual
partitions?

I have slaved the HD I am going to reinstall on in another machine to
retreive my data.
Can I F-Disk and reformat in the current machine THEN put HD in 2nd machine
and install a "different" edition of XP Home?
Or,to put it another way.
Does the SAME edition/CD of XP Home have to be used to format the HD in
order
too install THAT edition?

Thanks
Xan

 

[Xandros]

After you backup your data in the second system you can keep the drive
connected and simply delete the partition(s) by using the Computer
Management Console in that computer. Once you are certain you want to remove
the partitions just right click your My Computer icon and select "Manage" to
bring up the CMC. In the left pane select Disk Management. In the right pane
right click the partition to delete and select Delete partition. When
finished you do not have to format. You can simply shutdown, remove the
drive, set the jumper to Master (or Cable Select) and plug it back into the
computer you will reinstall on. Boot off the XP Cd that you plan to install
from and follow the installation prompts.

An alternative is to backup the data. Shutdown and remove the drive. Set the
jumper to Master (or Cable Select), boot off the XP installation CD and
follow the prompts to install. You will have the options presented to delete
and format.

So either way will work.

 

[DL]

F-Disk is a win9* command and not used since win2k

 

[Onsokumaru]

I want to do a clean installation of XP Home on a multi partitioned drive.
Is it best to remove the partitions THEN F-Disk, OR, F-Disk individual
partitions?

I have slaved the HD I am going to reinstall on in another machine to
retreive my data.
Can I F-Disk and reformat in the current machine THEN put HD in 2nd
machine and install a "different" edition of XP Home?
Or,to put it another way.
Does the SAME edition/CD of XP Home have to be used to format the HD in
order
too install THAT edition?

Thanks
Xan

XP will install on NTFS created by any other XP system. It only need to be a
primary partition.
XP setup should take care of the rest.

No need to "F-disk", which isn't used for XP anyway. Just a "full" format
before OS installation if NTFS is already being used.

Since you are goint to be formating anyway, why bother doing it before
moving drives? You might as well do it when you install XP again. Deleting
then recreating the partition won't make much, (if any), difference.

 

[PD]

F-Disk is a win9* command and not used since win2k

Wrong. As long as the OP's drive is Fat 32, the system can be booted
from either a DOS floppy or a CD that has FDISK.EXE on it.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Wrong. As long as the OP's drive is Fat 32, the system can be booted
from either a DOS floppy or a CD that has FDISK.EXE on it.

Perhaps you understand this and just wrote it sloppily, but as that
sentence stands, it's very confusing and inaccurate.

First of all, regardless of what file system is on the hard drive, the
computer can be booted from a bootable DOS floppy or from a CD.

Second, the floppy or CD doesn't have to have fdisk.exe on it to boot
from the floppy or CD.

The FAT32 issue deals with whether the hard drive is visible after
booting from a DOS diskette. If the drive (or drives) is/are FAT32 (or
FAT16) they will be visible after booting. If they are NTFS, they will
not be visible, unless the boot diskette also contains a special
program (such as NTFSDOS) to make it visible.

If you want to use FDISK to delete the existing partition(s), you can
do that even if it's NTFS, and even if you don't have NTFSDOS on your
diskette. However FDISK will not let you create an NTFS partition.

 

[Lil' Dave]

I want to do a clean installation of XP Home on a multi partitioned drive.
Is it best to remove the partitions THEN F-Disk, OR, F-Disk individual
partitions?

I have slaved the HD I am going to reinstall on in another machine to
retreive my data.
Can I F-Disk and reformat in the current machine THEN put HD in 2nd
machine and install a "different" edition of XP Home?
Or,to put it another way.
Does the SAME edition/CD of XP Home have to be used to format the HD in
order
too install THAT edition?

Thanks
Xan

Fdisk (no hyphen) is a command used in msdos operating system. Its purpose
surrounds creating, deleting, and assessing FAT and FAT32 partitions. Its
sister, format.com, must be used after rebooting the PC, to format such
created partitions with fdisk.

Ordinarily, one only needs to create a formatted primary and active
partition, ordinarily with the XP install CD, and install XP. Further
partitions can be created within the XP environment much faster.

If the partition is required to be FAT32 and larger than 32GB (you didn't
indicate), XP cannot create such or format such.

Use of fdisk (without its sister format.com) is suggestive of baiting
newbies to make their hard drive useless for thier intended purpose of
making useful partitions. Only use such if familiar with msdos environment
and using format.com after rebooting to format such an fdisk created
partition. Fdisk has rollover of partition size indication and varies with
the version of fdisk, causing failure of partition to report actual
partition size if the partition exceeds this limit. Fdisk versions prior to
windows 95 version B, are incapable of creating a FAT32 partition. These
prior versions have FAT16 limitations.

Dave