Total Wipe and format of harddrive with XP & Vista?

[Lilo Lentz]

Hiya

If I want to totally wipe my harddrive that has a dual boot of XP and Vista
and reformat and partition it, how would I BEST go about it?

Should I use my XP-Pro disk to do it OR first use VISTA disk to format the
partition it's on, and then XP for the rest?

Right now it's divided into 3 partitions, one with XP, one with only
installed programs for both XP and Vista - and of course one for Vista.
Actually there's also a small portion of aprox. 14 gig, that I suspect Vista
made. Would I need the Vista disk to remove that one?

It's a normal IDE harddrive...

Lilo

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Either can be used to remove the existing partitions, but which one you use
to create the new ones depends on what you want to end up with. Both XP and
Vista need to create and format their installation partition, and because of
small differences in the file systems, the one each creates is not suitable
for the other OS.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Lilo Lentz]

Right... just needed to be sure.

I will use the XP first then. Will make 2 partitions with it and leave the
rest for Vista, cuz I want to dual boot again.

Thanks for the quick response

Lilo

 

[Jerry]

The problem I found with using Vista to partition the hard drive was that
all the partitions were designated as "Primary". Is there anyway to have
only the OS partition be Primary and the rest as logical? Or is this even a
problem?