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Old June 7th, 2003 Top | #1
blueyedboy
 
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Default Clean Off Hard Drive
Xp Home edition giving big trouble. My father in law rather foolishly likes to re install XP every time he gets the the most smallest of problems with his PC. I have told him time and time again that he will cause great damage and should only re-install windows if he is absolutely desperate.

Now it would seem my words have come true and his system is totally corrupt. I want to reformat the HDD but cant. In windows 98 I used to do Fdisk. WHat do you do with XP.?? I cant do it by starting windows and right clicking on C: and choosing format, because it just tells me that I cant do that whilst other utilities are using the drive.

Any Ideas how I can manually do it. Fdisk was a very usefull tool on 98'... why you cant do it anymore is silly. Please help.
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Old June 7th, 2003 Top | #2
ZAnwar
 
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boot up with a win98 floppy disk, then FDISK the drive.
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Old June 7th, 2003 Top | #3
 
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use the delete partition/create partition on the xp cd.
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Old June 7th, 2003 Top | #4
2z
 
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if you wanna go even further you could do a low level format
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Old June 7th, 2003 Top | #5
blueyedboy
 
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TwoZigzagColt45

Just did it using windows 98 cdrom. deleted the partition, created a new and created a new one. when I ran the command format C: /s , I gat a bad command file name mesg.

Ran " Extract edb.cab format.com" but it kept saying the disk was write protected.

rebooted the pc with the Advent Recovery disc in (Norton Ghost), and it is now re -installing XP.

Dont yet know if the problems will be resolved.... but anyway.. how do I do a low level format.?? Laymans terms please cos I am a bit thick with Dos.

Also, XP home was pre installed on the system so I cant use the XP cd (which I dont have) to delete / create partitions.
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Old June 8th, 2003 Top | #6
2z
 
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go to your harddrive manufacturers website & search the download section for "low level format utility"
extract the files to floppy & reboot to floppy
follow the onsreen instructions
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