Clean Off Hard Drive

[blueyedboy]

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.

 

[ZAnwar]

boot up with a win98 floppy disk, then FDISK the drive.

 

[GoNz0]

use the delete partition/create partition on the xp cd.

 

[2z]

if you wanna go even further you could do a low level format

 

[blueyedboy]

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.

 

[2z]

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