Reformat

[wayne.fisher]

In the attempt to rid my hard drive of viruses, I tried to
reformat the hard drive. I was lead to believe by my
computer's mfr that by reinstalling the XP OS, it would
reformat and erase all of the data on the data before
installing, which is what I wanted. Not to be. It left all
of the stuff on there. And when I tried to do a "del *.*"
or "format c:\" it won't let me. What's next?

 

[Phil]

*Warning - you will lose all data*

Boot to the xp cd and follow the on-screen instructions. The cd is bootable
and has all the tools to format and install. Make sure you choose to format
during the setup. Read all the instruction screens.

Or,

Boot to a win9x floppy boot disk, run Fdisk, delete partitions, create new
partitions, reboot to boot disk again, run format, (or reboot to xp cd,
format, install xp). Get boot disk here: www.bootdisk.com

 

[Alex Nichol]

Boot to the xp cd and follow the on-screen instructions. The cd is bootable
and has all the tools to format and install. Make sure you choose to format
during the setup. Read all the instruction screens.

A bit more detail: Set the BIOS to boot CD before HD and boot to the XP
CD direct. Enter Setup, and after the license agreement take New
Install. When it asks you to confirm where, hit ESC; select and delete
the current partition and make a new RAW one to be formatted at the next
stage

The important point is the delete. Without that it will just go ahead
and make a new install over the top of the old one