formatting drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter lurchman
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lurchman

My son has a alienware machine, and his main hard drive went bad. I
used the recovery disc that came with it, and used it to re-install
windows xp on the new hard drive, I installed, in his machine.
Windows seemed to install okay, but when we went to reboot, it said we
were missing a file. I used the disc again, with windows on it and
expected it to see the existing install, and prompt me as to what to
do. I expected to get the option to have it check for missing or
damaged files. It didn't, it went ahead and installed another set of
window files on the same drive. I won't go into all the problems this
caused, but what I wanted to do was to re-format the drive and start
from scratch. But it won't let me format the drive, and using the
windows disc is useless. Is there some way I can force it to format the
C drive? One thing odd, was that when I installed windows the first
tme, it didn't prompt me for the security code that came with the disc.
This seemed strange, because everytime I've installed windows
elsewhere, I was always prompted to give the 20 - 25 digit code. I hate
having to deal with windows in these off the shelf machines. Any help
would be appreciated.
 
My son has a alienware machine, and his main hard drive went bad. I
used the recovery disc that came with it, and used it to re-install
windows xp on the new hard drive, I installed, in his machine.
Windows seemed to install okay, but when we went to reboot, it said we
were missing a file. I used the disc again, with windows on it and
expected it to see the existing install, and prompt me as to what to
do. I expected to get the option to have it check for missing or
damaged files. It didn't, it went ahead and installed another set of
window files on the same drive. I won't go into all the problems this
caused, but what I wanted to do was to re-format the drive and start
from scratch. But it won't let me format the drive, and using the
windows disc is useless. Is there some way I can force it to format the
C drive? One thing odd, was that when I installed windows the first
tme, it didn't prompt me for the security code that came with the disc.
This seemed strange, because everytime I've installed windows
elsewhere, I was always prompted to give the 20 - 25 digit code. I hate
having to deal with windows in these off the shelf machines. Any help
would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

Formatting the drive is easy but I'm not sure that this is
what you want. I suspect that you do not have a WinXP
installation CD but some sort of recovery CD, in which
case I recommend you read the manual that came with
your PC to see how exactly to use the CD.

In case you still wish to go ahead and format your disk
here is how it's done. Note that this process is like
razor blades: It cuts through anything.

1. Make a Win98 boot disk (www.bootdisk.com).
2. Put delpart.exe on it (http://www.russelltexas.com/delpart.htm).
3. Boot the machine with this disk.
4. Run delpart.exe, identify the WinXP partition and delete it.
 
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