Reformat and reinstallation

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Guest

With the help and advice of some considerate people in this group, I've
decided to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows XP Home from the OEM
CD. I need to know whether to reformat first -- using either XP tools or
command prompts -- or will the reinstallation setup (booting from the CD)
allow me the option of reformatting before reinstallation.

Thanks in advance from those of us who come here to ask the questions to
those of you who come here to answer them.
 
Booting from the CD will allow you to delete, recreate, then format your
partitions.

hth
DDS W 2k MVP MCSE
 
Hi Justin,

You can delete the current partition, then create a new one and format it
during Setup....see step #10b here:
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html
I would highly recommend that you read that page in its entirety before
commencing the reinstall of XP.

If you have an "always on" connection to the internet (eg., cable), before
you perform the install, ensure that the modem is unplugged from the
computer, as Blaster or Sasser worm attacks may occur during the network
setup portion of the install. If Service Pack 2 is included in the version
of XP Pro that you are installing, that Service Pack contains the critical
updates that protect against Blaster and Sasser. If Service Pack 2 is NOT
included, before you connect to the internet, enable the Internet Connection
Firewall before connecting:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=283673

Once you have the Internet Connection Firewall enabled and have connected to
the internet, either download and install SP2 from Windows Update or, at the
very least, install the separate critical patches:

Blaster
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...ae-a1ba-4d4a-b424-95d32cfc8cba&DisplayLang=en

Sasser
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...9E-DA3F-43B9-A4F1-AF243B6168F3&displaylang=en



Regards,
 
Hi Danny --
Can I boot from an external CD-ROM? I just found out that my internal drive
doesn't read. Also -- how can I change BIOS to boot from CD b/4 hard drive?
 
Thanks Patti


Patti MacLeod said:
Hi Justin,

You can delete the current partition, then create a new one and format it
during Setup....see step #10b here:
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html
I would highly recommend that you read that page in its entirety before
commencing the reinstall of XP.

If you have an "always on" connection to the internet (eg., cable), before
you perform the install, ensure that the modem is unplugged from the
computer, as Blaster or Sasser worm attacks may occur during the network
setup portion of the install. If Service Pack 2 is included in the version
of XP Pro that you are installing, that Service Pack contains the critical
updates that protect against Blaster and Sasser. If Service Pack 2 is NOT
included, before you connect to the internet, enable the Internet Connection
Firewall before connecting:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=283673

Once you have the Internet Connection Firewall enabled and have connected to
the internet, either download and install SP2 from Windows Update or, at the
very least, install the separate critical patches:

Blaster
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...ae-a1ba-4d4a-b424-95d32cfc8cba&DisplayLang=en

Sasser
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...9E-DA3F-43B9-A4F1-AF243B6168F3&displaylang=en



Regards,
Click to expand...
 
Hey, Patti --

Do you know if I can boot from an external CD-ROM -- the original internal
that came with my Dell no longer works.
 
I've done this about 4 times before. The most recent time(last night) I did
the reformat thing in setup, but I fell asleep before it was done. I have no
idea what went on but today my computer turns on and just goes to a blank
screen. So I put the Win XP cd in and restarted. It says press any key to
boot from CD-Rom like it should but when I press a key it says Setup is
inspecting your hardware configuration and then goes to a blank screen.
Anybody know what I can do to get my system back?
 
sorry to be a pain in the ass about this but I really need my computer to
work. If anyone has ANY ideas on how to fix this it would be greatly
appreciated
 
Hi kel,

The possible reason why you have not yet received an answer to your query is
due to your having posted it within another's thread. No, I'm not going to
go on about thread hijacking, but I do believe that many who surf these
newsgroups looking for questions that they may be able to answer first look
at questions for which there are no responses. Having posted in an ongoing
thread, others who are reading the unanswered questions are missing your
question.

Unfortunately, I am currently in the midst of researching a possible
solution to Justin's problem (as XP Setup may not recognize his particular
brand of external CDROM) and a couple of others, so I don't really have the
time to do further research into a possible solution for your problem,
except to recommend that, perhaps, you uninstall all non-essential hardware
(USB devices such as printer or scanner, sound card, modem or ethernet card,
etc.) leaving just the basics for when you run Setup.

If you create a New Post in order to start a fresh thread with your
question, perhaps others will chime in with other possible fixes.



Regards,
 
Only if your computer's BIOS supports booting from an external device.

There may be another workaround, if your computer has a floppy drive. One
thing that may be problematic with booting from the Setup floppies is that
XP's Setup may not have built-in support for that brand of external CD that
you're using (and I'm assuming it's a USB CDROM)........I am currently
looking into a possible workaround for adding support for your (USB?)
external CDROM.



Regards,
 
Patti -- thanks alot for your advice -- apparently I was alittle hasty in my
determination that my original Dell internal CD-ROM wasn't working -- it's
just not working very well (or quickly, to be accurate) -- I succeeded in
reinstalling XP and followed, I thought, the directions regarding formatting
in step 10b at Michael Stevens website, but now my C drive, under disk
properties, is only 15G and I can't find the other 65G to reformat as I
understood I would be able to according to the previously mentioned step 10b
-- how can I reaccess that other 65G of disk space?
 
And I just finished finding a possible remedy for making sure you had USB
support for your external CDROM <g>.......well, I'll just write it up and
save it into my archive of help files.

It almost sounds like you've run up against WIN98's "old fdisk" drive size
limitation.

If you go into Disk Management (Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer
Management>expand Storage in left pane>Disk Management), in the lower pane
on the right, does it show the remaining 65G as unallocated or unpartitioned
space? If so, you would need to use a third-party partitioning utility in
order to resize the XP partition to incorporate the remaining
unallocated/unpartitioned space without destroying data that is currently on
the XP partition. One such utility, which has a full-featured free trial
download, is BootITNG:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html
I would highly recommend reading the Manual (requires Acrobat Reader) before
using the product:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/downloads/bootitng.pdf

As I have never used it (I use Partition Magic when necessary), I cannot
give you a walkthrough for installing it and using it to resize the
partition.

Another option, though you'd lose your current data, is to rerun Setup, and
when you get to step 10b at Michael Stevens website, ensure that the
unallocated/unpartitioned space on which you're choosing to create the new
partition is 80G (or approximately, 80,000MB).



Regards,
 
I have Windows XP and I need to re-format my hard disk. Problem is, whenever
I click format, this message shows up telling me to close all programs and
any folder showing the contents of the hard drive. What's odd is, all of my
programs are shut off. If the my virus sacn is running, does that affect the
formatting of the disk?

Thanks
 
first of all you cannot(XP will not let you) format the drive while you are
using the OS.You can format another drive that the OS is not on.
If your intention is to format and reinstall do so during the install of
XP.In your BIOS make sure that the CD drive is listed as the 1st boot
device,place the XP CD in the Cd drive and reboot.Watch for the message
"press any key to boot from CD"
do so.........XP setup will start.During the install you can format the
drive that you will be installing XP onto.If you have more than one
drive/partition watch and make sure you pick the right drive/partition.
here is a website that has details on installation
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp
hope this helps
peterk
 
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