Removing WinXP OS from a Hard Drive

[Guest]

How can a WinXP full clean install be removed from a hard drive so the drive
can be reformatted with a Win98SE startup disk so Win98SE can be installed
instead ? I have ruined an entire hard drive attempting this and do not want
to repeat the mistake.

Description : Windows XP Home SP2 while reliable after install becomes
corrupted after several months of use causing BSOD crashes. Attempting a
repair of the WinXP OS simply allows the OS to boot again and operate but
does not fix what is causing these crashes which continue to occur. It has
been my experience with all the Win OS's I have used that they are all
unreliable in this same fashion. It is either they begin to run slowly or
they begin crashing more and more frequently. To this day I have never had a
Win OS stay reliable for more than about 1 year without requiring a full
re-installation to correct these problems. With Win98 and earlier OS's this
was not a big issue as long as data was kept seperate from the boot drive, as
the boot partition could be wiped clean and reformatted, then the OS and apps
re-installed. After several months of use from a new install WinXP SP2 began
crashing more and more frequently. I attempted this same method of
reformatting the boot partition and re-installing WinXP and this ruined a
near new 80 GB HDD which then would no longer report its correct size no
matter how I tried to fix it. I had to buy a new HDD and installed Win XP
Home SP2 fresh for the second time and all was back to working order. About a
month ago the problems began occurring again with crashes starting and
occurring more frequently until today the OS has become so unstable it will
not run properly anymore. I run a business of audio recording from this
computer and I am simply sick of this. I currently have a clients entire
project on this same HDD, but different partition than the boot partition,
and while I have backed up the data I cannot afford the down time every 4-6
months in fixing this problem, reactivating the OS by phone, replacing parts
unneccessarily to try and find the problem, etc. This is an extreme nuisance
! While Win XP may be faster than Win98SE, with WIN98SE I can wipe a boot
partition, reinstall Win98SE and applications, and be back in business in
about two hours.

Error Messages : I have exhausted myself online searching for an answer to
why this occurs and have found no solutions. It seems an important fact that
from a clean install everything works perfectly for months without errors.
Without any user changes to the system, no new software installation, etc.
these problems begin to occur. This first begins as a crash once in a great
while ending with an IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error message. This has occurred
while using Cool Edit Pro which is a multitrack audio program, playing the
game Empire Earth, and while reading/writing a DVD using DVD software. These
crashes become more frequent over a period of months until other errors begin
occurring such as BAD_POOL_HEADER and PFN_LIST_CORRUPT where eventually the
OS becomes too unstable to run properly. Many posts suggest the cause of
these error messages are heat-related issues, failed RAM memory, defective
hard drives, corrupted drivers, etc. where I find this not to be the case at
all.

I have a non-proprietary P4 3GHZ 2mb L2 on ABIT MGuru board with 1 GB HyperX
DDR400 RAM the whole system less than 1 year old. It is dusted regularly,
there are working fans everywhere on near everything, even the supply has two
fans. I feel no excessive heat on any component and the ABIT utility reports
temps are as they should be. I have tested the RAM using the Memtest86
utility and there were no errors in 10 test passes. I have scanned the hard
drive and the files on the drive and have found no problems. Most importantly
this system has never been setup to connect to the internet and has only had
licensed software installed on it, no downloaded software in otherwords, no
viruses, no tampering.

Considering this is not a hardware issue or heat issue, it seems to me this
leaves two possible culprits. Either WinXP itself becomes corrupted as I
expect is the case, or a device driver becomes corrupted, in which case I
would have to wonder why that is unless it is WinXP which is corrupting the
driver. While the only unsigned device driver on this system is the one for
my professional audio card made by M-Audio, the fact that it is an unsigned
driver seems irrelevant to it being the culprit of these problems as it
operates perfectly when installed after a fresh WinXP install.

I am left to believe at this point that WinXP in its currently build has
failure issues possibly worse then Win98SE and certainly more of a nuisance
to strat fresh again with an install. I hope it will not take my purchasing a
whole new hard drive to return to Win98SE and abandon use of XP.

 

[Alan]

How can a WinXP full clean install be removed from a hard drive so the drive
can be reformatted with a Win98SE startup disk so Win98SE can be installed
instead ? I have ruined an entire hard drive attempting this and do not want
to repeat the mistake.

Description : Windows XP Home SP2 while reliable after install becomes
corrupted after several months of use causing BSOD crashes. Attempting a
repair of the WinXP OS simply allows the OS to boot again and operate but
does not fix what is causing these crashes which continue to occur. It has
been my experience with all the Win OS's I have used that they are all
unreliable in this same fashion. It is either they begin to run slowly or
they begin crashing more and more frequently. To this day I have never had a
Win OS stay reliable for more than about 1 year without requiring a full
re-installation to correct these problems. With Win98 and earlier OS's this
was not a big issue as long as data was kept seperate from the boot drive, as
the boot partition could be wiped clean and reformatted, then the OS and apps
re-installed. After several months of use from a new install WinXP SP2 began
crashing more and more frequently. I attempted this same method of
reformatting the boot partition and re-installing WinXP and this ruined a
near new 80 GB HDD which then would no longer report its correct size no
matter how I tried to fix it. I had to buy a new HDD and installed Win XP
Home SP2 fresh for the second time and all was back to working order. About a
month ago the problems began occurring again with crashes starting and
occurring more frequently until today the OS has become so unstable it will
not run properly anymore. I run a business of audio recording from this
computer and I am simply sick of this. I currently have a clients entire
project on this same HDD, but different partition than the boot partition,
and while I have backed up the data I cannot afford the down time every 4-6
months in fixing this problem, reactivating the OS by phone, replacing parts
unneccessarily to try and find the problem, etc. This is an extreme nuisance
! While Win XP may be faster than Win98SE, with WIN98SE I can wipe a boot
partition, reinstall Win98SE and applications, and be back in business in
about two hours.

Error Messages : I have exhausted myself online searching for an answer to
why this occurs and have found no solutions. It seems an important fact that
from a clean install everything works perfectly for months without errors.
Without any user changes to the system, no new software installation, etc.
these problems begin to occur. This first begins as a crash once in a great
while ending with an IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error message. This has occurred
while using Cool Edit Pro which is a multitrack audio program, playing the
game Empire Earth, and while reading/writing a DVD using DVD software. These
crashes become more frequent over a period of months until other errors begin
occurring such as BAD_POOL_HEADER and PFN_LIST_CORRUPT where eventually the
OS becomes too unstable to run properly. Many posts suggest the cause of
these error messages are heat-related issues, failed RAM memory, defective
hard drives, corrupted drivers, etc. where I find this not to be the case at
all.

I have a non-proprietary P4 3GHZ 2mb L2 on ABIT MGuru board with 1 GB HyperX
DDR400 RAM the whole system less than 1 year old. It is dusted regularly,
there are working fans everywhere on near everything, even the supply has two
fans. I feel no excessive heat on any component and the ABIT utility reports
temps are as they should be. I have tested the RAM using the Memtest86
utility and there were no errors in 10 test passes. I have scanned the hard
drive and the files on the drive and have found no problems. Most importantly
this system has never been setup to connect to the internet and has only had
licensed software installed on it, no downloaded software in otherwords, no
viruses, no tampering.

Considering this is not a hardware issue or heat issue, it seems to me this
leaves two possible culprits. Either WinXP itself becomes corrupted as I
expect is the case, or a device driver becomes corrupted, in which case I
would have to wonder why that is unless it is WinXP which is corrupting the
driver. While the only unsigned device driver on this system is the one for
my professional audio card made by M-Audio, the fact that it is an unsigned
driver seems irrelevant to it being the culprit of these problems as it
operates perfectly when installed after a fresh WinXP install.

I am left to believe at this point that WinXP in its currently build has
failure issues possibly worse then Win98SE and certainly more of a nuisance
to strat fresh again with an install. I hope it will not take my purchasing a
whole new hard drive to return to Win98SE and abandon use of XP.

What manufacturer of hard drive do you have? If it is Seagate, go to the
support web site and down load Disc Wizard starter edition. These run on two
floppys' and run from boot. With this software you should be able to zero
fill the entire drive/reformat for 98 or XP independent of Windows. (A
complete zero fill of the entire drive we show up if you have any hard drive
problems or not). If you don't have Seagate then my understanding that you
may be able to use this software anyway as it recognises other manufacturers
drives or download then own version.
Alan

 

[Anna]

How can a WinXP full clean install be removed from a hard drive so the
drive
can be reformatted with a Win98SE startup disk so Win98SE can be installed
instead ? I have ruined an entire hard drive attempting this and do not
want
to repeat the mistake.

Description : Windows XP Home SP2 while reliable after install becomes
corrupted after several months of use causing BSOD crashes. Attempting a
repair of the WinXP OS simply allows the OS to boot again and operate but
does not fix what is causing these crashes which continue to occur. It has
been my experience with all the Win OS's I have used that they are all
unreliable in this same fashion. It is either they begin to run slowly or
they begin crashing more and more frequently. To this day I have never had
a
Win OS stay reliable for more than about 1 year without requiring a full
re-installation to correct these problems. With Win98 and earlier OS's
this
was not a big issue as long as data was kept seperate from the boot drive,
as
the boot partition could be wiped clean and reformatted, then the OS and
apps
re-installed. After several months of use from a new install WinXP SP2
began
crashing more and more frequently. I attempted this same method of
reformatting the boot partition and re-installing WinXP and this ruined a
near new 80 GB HDD which then would no longer report its correct size no
matter how I tried to fix it. I had to buy a new HDD and installed Win XP
Home SP2 fresh for the second time and all was back to working order.
About a
month ago the problems began occurring again with crashes starting and
occurring more frequently until today the OS has become so unstable it
will
not run properly anymore. I run a business of audio recording from this
computer and I am simply sick of this. I currently have a clients entire
project on this same HDD, but different partition than the boot partition,
and while I have backed up the data I cannot afford the down time every
4-6
months in fixing this problem, reactivating the OS by phone, replacing
parts
unneccessarily to try and find the problem, etc. This is an extreme
nuisance
! While Win XP may be faster than Win98SE, with WIN98SE I can wipe a boot
partition, reinstall Win98SE and applications, and be back in business in
about two hours.

Error Messages : I have exhausted myself online searching for an answer to
why this occurs and have found no solutions. It seems an important fact
that
from a clean install everything works perfectly for months without errors.
Without any user changes to the system, no new software installation, etc.
these problems begin to occur. This first begins as a crash once in a
great
while ending with an IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error message. This has
occurred
while using Cool Edit Pro which is a multitrack audio program, playing the
game Empire Earth, and while reading/writing a DVD using DVD software.
These
crashes become more frequent over a period of months until other errors
begin
occurring such as BAD_POOL_HEADER and PFN_LIST_CORRUPT where eventually
the
OS becomes too unstable to run properly. Many posts suggest the cause of
these error messages are heat-related issues, failed RAM memory,
defective
hard drives, corrupted drivers, etc. where I find this not to be the case
at
all.

I have a non-proprietary P4 3GHZ 2mb L2 on ABIT MGuru board with 1 GB
HyperX
DDR400 RAM the whole system less than 1 year old. It is dusted regularly,
there are working fans everywhere on near everything, even the supply has
two
fans. I feel no excessive heat on any component and the ABIT utility
reports
temps are as they should be. I have tested the RAM using the Memtest86
utility and there were no errors in 10 test passes. I have scanned the
hard
drive and the files on the drive and have found no problems. Most
importantly
this system has never been setup to connect to the internet and has only
had
licensed software installed on it, no downloaded software in otherwords,
no
viruses, no tampering.

Considering this is not a hardware issue or heat issue, it seems to me
this
leaves two possible culprits. Either WinXP itself becomes corrupted as I
expect is the case, or a device driver becomes corrupted, in which case I
would have to wonder why that is unless it is WinXP which is corrupting
the
driver. While the only unsigned device driver on this system is the one
for
my professional audio card made by M-Audio, the fact that it is an
unsigned
driver seems irrelevant to it being the culprit of these problems as it
operates perfectly when installed after a fresh WinXP install.

I am left to believe at this point that WinXP in its currently build has
failure issues possibly worse then Win98SE and certainly more of a
nuisance
to strat fresh again with an install. I hope it will not take my
purchasing a
whole new hard drive to return to Win98SE and abandon use of XP.

Ravenhurst:
Given your situation as you've described it, it's really hard to believe
that reverting back to Win98 (Special Edition or otherwise!) is the answer
to the problems you're experiencing. Your hardware certainly seems robust
enough to effectively handle the XP OS. And since you've apparently tested
your hardware and have found all your components non-defective, we'll assume
(at least for the moment) the problems you've encountered lie elsewhere.
(BTW, you indicate you've scanned your HDD for problems and found none, but
have you tested it with the diagnostic utility available from the manuf. of
the disk? If not, perhaps it would be wise to do so.)

We'll further assume that from time-to-time you perform the usual
"housekeeping" duties to tidy up the OS, i.e., Disk Cleanup, emptying your
Temp files, etc., right? And you've routinely checked your system for any
malware.

Is it possible that one of the applications you use - particularly the
one(s) involved in your audio recording business - may be at the root of the
problems you're experiencing?

I expect you've Googled for information re the error messages you've
received. Unfortunately the cause of these errors can arise from myriad
sources - they're not easy to track down. But I can't believe the situation
would be any better using the Win98 OS.

By & large there's really no reason why a user should have to routinely
reinstall the XP OS on a yearly or some other timetable basis. We've worked
with hundreds of XP systems over the years without the need to do so. Our
experience has shown that the XP OS (even with its flaws) is significantly
superior to Win98 as well as all other previous MS operating systems in
terms of basic stability and day-to-day performance.

I would hope you could keep on trying to pin down the cause of the problems
you're experiencing and be able to take corrective action. But if you're set
on going back to Win98 you can, of course, do so. Probably the most direct
route is to use your Win98 DOS boot disk and simply delete and existing
partition, reformat the HDD and then install the Win98 OS. I'm sure you're
aware that all data on that HDD will be lost, so obviously it would be
prudent to back up any data you will later need. You will, of course, need
to reinstall your programs. But if you can - before doing so - at least
(using a disk imaging program, e.g., Ghost or Acronis) clone the contents of
your present working HDD to another HDD (I believe you have at least two
HDDs) so that you can keep working with the XP system to see if you can
resolve your problems.
Anna

 

[Bruce Chambers]

How can a WinXP full clean install be removed from a hard drive so the drive
can be reformatted with a Win98SE startup disk so Win98SE can be installed
instead ?

The normal way to "uninstall" any operating system is to format the
hard drive and install a new OS of your choice.

I have ruined an entire hard drive attempting this and do not want
to repeat the mistake.

Can't even imagine how that would be possible.

Description : Windows XP Home SP2 while reliable after install becomes
corrupted after several months of use causing BSOD crashes. Attempting a
repair of the WinXP OS simply allows the OS to boot again and operate but
does not fix what is causing these crashes which continue to occur.

Well, yes. And such behavior will continue until you fix the hardware
or device driver problem that's causing the BSODs. Repeatedly
reinstalling the OS won't have any lasting affect.

It has
been my experience with all the Win OS's I have used that they are all
unreliable in this same fashion. It is either they begin to run slowly or
they begin crashing more and more frequently. To this day I have never had a
Win OS stay reliable for more than about 1 year without requiring a full
re-installation to correct these problems.

Then I suggest you hire someone who knows how to properly maintain a
computer to look after yours for you.

With Win98 and earlier OS's this
was not a big issue as long as data was kept seperate from the boot drive, as
the boot partition could be wiped clean and reformatted, then the OS and apps
re-installed. After several months of use from a new install WinXP SP2 began
crashing more and more frequently. I attempted this same method of
reformatting the boot partition and re-installing WinXP and this ruined a
near new 80 GB HDD which then would no longer report its correct size no
matter how I tried to fix it. I had to buy a new HDD ...

Further proof that you really need to seek professional technical
support. You "ruined" nothing and wasted money by not having even a
fundamental understanding of hard drive partitioning.


and installed Win XP

Home SP2 fresh for the second time and all was back to working order. About a
month ago the problems began occurring again with crashes starting and
occurring more frequently until today the OS has become so unstable it will
not run properly anymore. I run a business of audio recording from this
computer and I am simply sick of this. I currently have a clients entire
project on this same HDD, but different partition than the boot partition,
and while I have backed up the data I cannot afford the down time every 4-6
months in fixing this problem, reactivating the OS by phone, replacing parts
unneccessarily to try and find the problem, etc. This is an extreme nuisance
! While Win XP may be faster than Win98SE, with WIN98SE I can wipe a boot
partition, reinstall Win98SE and applications, and be back in business in
about two hours.

Error Messages : I have exhausted myself online searching for an answer to
why this occurs and have found no solutions. It seems an important fact that
from a clean install everything works perfectly for months without errors.
Without any user changes to the system, no new software installation, etc.
these problems begin to occur. This first begins as a crash once in a great
while ending with an IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error message. This has occurred
while using Cool Edit Pro which is a multitrack audio program, playing the
game Empire Earth, and while reading/writing a DVD using DVD software. These
crashes become more frequent over a period of months until other errors begin
occurring such as BAD_POOL_HEADER and PFN_LIST_CORRUPT where eventually the
OS becomes too unstable to run properly. Many posts suggest the cause of
these error messages are heat-related issues, failed RAM memory, defective
hard drives, corrupted drivers, etc. where I find this not to be the case at
all.

I have a non-proprietary P4 3GHZ 2mb L2 on ABIT MGuru board with 1 GB HyperX
DDR400 RAM the whole system less than 1 year old. It is dusted regularly,
there are working fans everywhere on near everything, even the supply has two
fans. I feel no excessive heat on any component and the ABIT utility reports
temps are as they should be. I have tested the RAM using the Memtest86
utility and there were no errors in 10 test passes. I have scanned the hard
drive and the files on the drive and have found no problems. Most importantly
this system has never been setup to connect to the internet and has only had
licensed software installed on it, no downloaded software in otherwords, no
viruses, no tampering.

Considering this is not a hardware issue or heat issue, it seems to me this
leaves two possible culprits. Either WinXP itself becomes corrupted as I
expect is the case, or a device driver becomes corrupted, in which case I
would have to wonder why that is unless it is WinXP which is corrupting the
driver. While the only unsigned device driver on this system is the one for
my professional audio card made by M-Audio, the fact that it is an unsigned
driver seems irrelevant to it being the culprit of these problems as it
operates perfectly when installed after a fresh WinXP install.

I am left to believe at this point that WinXP in its currently build has
failure issues possibly worse then Win98SE and certainly more of a nuisance
to strat fresh again with an install. I hope it will not take my purchasing a
whole new hard drive to return to Win98SE and abandon use of XP.

Rather than repeatedly wasting money replacing perfectly good hard
drives, why don't you invest in a book or two and learn something about
computers in general and WinXP, in particular?


--

Bruce Chambers

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