format: u/ in xp

[doug s]

i have a hard drive that has corrupt copy of xp and i cant
boot recovery cons or get into safe mode, it is 80 gig
ultra 100, i can boot from 98 startup and run fdisk but
it obviously doesnt see ntfs partition, i want to format
the drive using FORMAT /U but im not sure what to do i
am thinking of getting a windows millenium bootdisk i
think millenium disk can see fat 32 as well as ntfs
what do you think?
doug

 

[Joseph Conway [MSFT]]

WinME's boot disk will not see NTFS either, its a 9x OS. You could try find
something like a NTFS.DOS disk to boot the machine. However you should be
able to see the NTFS partition in FDISK as an unknow type which would allow
you to delete it and make a new FAT32 paritition if thats what you wanted.

Does Windows XP not allow you to format the drive off of a clean CD boot?

 

[Lorne Smith]

Boot from the XP CD and repartition/reformat from there...