Formatted Hard Drive accidentally

[Guest]

I accidentally formatted my Hard Drive - I have windows XP home edition and
no disk with which to reinstall/recover the OS.

When I try to boot the computer I recieve the following error;

incorrect system disk please insert disk and press any key

any help you may have in this matter would be greatly appreciated

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

You'll need to purchase a "Full Version" of
Windows XP and perform a "Clean Install".

Clean Install Windows XP
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows Shell/User

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:

| I accidentally formatted my Hard Drive - I have windows XP home edition and
| no disk with which to reinstall/recover the OS.
|
| When I try to boot the computer I recieve the following error;
|
| incorrect system disk please insert disk and press any key
|
| any help you may have in this matter would be greatly appreciated

 

[Guest]

How did you accidently format your HD?

Are you sure you haven't left a disc in the bootable drive by accident?

 

[Rock]

I accidentally formatted my Hard Drive - I have windows XP home edition and
no disk with which to reinstall/recover the OS.

When I try to boot the computer I recieve the following error;

incorrect system disk please insert disk and press any key

any help you may have in this matter would be greatly appreciated

How did you manage to "accidentally" format the drive? At any rate
you'll need some means for reinstalling the OS - either an installation
CD, a restore CD or a hidden partition on the drive with a an image of
the drive as received from the factory. If you bought the system from a
vendor contact them for info on how to restore your system. Otherwise
you'll need to purchase a copy of XP and install it.

 

[Plato]

I accidentally formatted my Hard Drive - I have windows XP home edition and
no disk with which to reinstall/recover the OS.

One should always own the cd for the OS they want to continue to use.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your reply - my wife formated the hard drive - I believe see was
trying to format a floppy disk - thanks for your time I have fixed the
problem with a boot disk and the partition in the hard drive that contined XP

 

[Harry Ohrn]

It is actually quite difficult to accidentally format the system drive. If
she was running Windows and popped a floppy into the floppy drive to format
but accidentally selected C: drive instead of the Floppy drive she would
have not been able to format C: as the operating system won't let you format
itself while it is running. If she booted the computer with a Windows 9x/Me
floppy and at the command prompt typed Format C:\ instead of Format A:\ she
wouldn't be able to read the NTFS format from DOS and therefore would have
received and error message. She would have to have booted the floppy ran
FDISK, selected the option to Delete the Non-DOS partition and that should
have given her the idea that she was way off base. Typically the only way to
format C is do so from either the Recovery Console or from the XP CD. But
because you don't have a Windows XP CD I am wondering how she could have
accomplished the format as a floppy wouldn't be used at all in the process.
Anyway it's good to see you sorted the problem.

 

[coal_brona]

Hello,

It is however possible to read NTFS in DOS. For that purpose special
tools such as NTFS Reader can be implemented. Actually this util is
really useful, as I've used it before. It is included into Active@ Boot
Disk, a mighty collection of powerful data tools, which allows you to
backup, erase, restore data etc. You should definately give it a try.

http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm