Help setting up hard drive for Windows XP

[Guest]

I had to replace my hard drive for my HP Pavilion laptop, and I do not know
how to run FDISK without a floppy drive. I contacted my laptop manufacturer,
who suggested I create a boot CD of killdisk. Unfortunately, it didn't
work-- I downloaded/burned it to CD, set the BIOS option to boot from CD
first, and received a "non system disk" error.

In other posts, I saw that it was recommended to boot from the Windows XP
CD, but I only have the "Operating System CD" that HP provided, which does
not give me that option.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Ted]

When you say the ("Operating System CD" that HP provided)does not give you
that option, what are you referring to? It should be a bootable system
restore disk that will load windows and all of the original software. You
will not need to partition or format your disk first. Besides, as far as I
know, FDISK will not work for you if you have a drive larger than 32 Gig
and/or want NTFS

 

[Brian A.]

http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/

--

Brian A. Sesko { MS MVP_Shell/User }
Conflicts start where information lacks.
http://basconotw.mvps.org/

Suggested posting do's/don'ts: http://www.dts-l.org/goodpost.htm
How to ask a question: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

 

[Brian A.]

Incorrect. Fdisk will partition disks over 32GB unless it's an old Fdisk
version. In that case there is a patch which takes care of it up to 137GB
disks.
Fdisk will create non-DOS partitions which can be formatted NTFS. If a
user created FAT 32 volumes/partitions, when running the XP install they
are given the choice to keep it as is or format NTFS.

--

Brian A. Sesko { MS MVP_Shell/User }
Conflicts start where information lacks.
http://basconotw.mvps.org/

Suggested posting do's/don'ts: http://www.dts-l.org/goodpost.htm
How to ask a question: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

 

[Ron Sommer]

The CD-ROM drive may not be set to boot before the hard drive.
Go into the Bios and check the boot order.

When you burned to CD did you select burn iso image or bootable CD.
The standard XP software will not burn a bootable CD. It will just burn the
iso file to the CD.
Some systems require you to hit a certain key to boot from a CD.

 

[Jonny]

Simply burning an executable file to CD, won't make the CD bootable.