Drive Format/Reinstall

[shulse]

Hello everyone. I have been searching around on the internet, and here, for a concise and conclusive guide on hot to reformat a hard drive and install XP. It seems that everywhere I go there is conflicting information...for example, at this point I have been told and have seen that I need a dos boot-disc. I have also been told or seen that I can boot directly from the XP cd. NTFS or Fat32?? My head is spinning.

Can anyone provide or steer me towards a guide that will provide info on how to erase the hard drive so that there is nothing on it, then show me how to format to a NTFS file system (from what I can decipher, this is the best option for me) and then install XP. I have one hard drive (40GB). I also have the a XP cd that came with my system for reinstalling.

Thanks.

 

[Bretenn]

just boot from xp cd is the easiest...... from there everything can be done!

 

[Heeter]

Just make sure your bios is set at first boot device, Then startup with the XPcd in your drive and follow instructions.


Heeter

 

[ZAnwar]

Definetely first check, if the CD you have got is a proper XP CD. Not a System restore cd.

 

[zyfos]

Ok, first off, assuming your copy of XP is bootable (most are), you have to make sure that your computer is set to boot from CD before the harddrive in your bios settings. Once you have that done, stick the CD in your CD drive and reboot. Somewhere during the boot process, it will say something like "Press any key to boot from CD..." so, hit a key. This starts up the XP install program. It will pretty much walk you though the setup step by step. When it asks you what partition/drive to install on, you can delete all the current partitions (select and hit D, then L to confirm) until you have one big empty one. Select that big empty one and hit ENTER. It will ask what file system you want to format with, do a regular format with NTFS. The rest should be fairly simple. The defaults for most everything else are ok I suppose. There's some customizing you can do after you finish installing, but that would take quite a bit more explaining to do.

 

[Hipster Doofus]

See if this will be of any help. Some of it will apply.

 

[Singleman593]

re:format/reinstall.

Originally posted by zyfos
Ok, first off, assuming your copy of XP is bootable (most are), you have to make sure that your computer is set to boot from CD before the harddrive in your bios settings. Once you have that done, stick the CD in your CD drive and reboot. Somewhere during the boot process, it will say something like "Press any key to boot from CD..." so, hit a key. This starts up the XP install program. It will pretty much walk you though the setup step by step. When it asks you what partition/drive to install on, you can delete all the current partitions (select and hit D, then L to confirm) until you have one big empty one. Select that big empty one and hit ENTER. It will ask what file system you want to format with, do a regular format with NTFS. The rest should be fairly simple. The defaults for most everything else are ok I suppose. There's some customizing you can do after you finish installing, but that would take quite a bit more explaining to do.

guys even if u follow the instructions to the t,it will never clean up the hdd,even if u do a quick or normal formatting.

 

[zyfos]

That depends on your definition of what "clean up the hdd" is. True, you might be able to retrieve some old information from a previous install, but who freakin cares. So long as the new file system doesn't know about the old stuff, XP should work just fine.

 

[Gus K]

As an AMD/VIA guy I've followed VIA's suggestions, in easy speak here . The idea of starting with the bare minimum makes sense, we don't want to confuse XP, during birth, too much.

 

[LeeJend]

Wow. The link in Gus K's post was good. Same procedure I follow and nicely written up.

One addition with regars to the online update:

I have had trouble on some machines jumping from an orignal release Win XP install directly to an SP1 update. I recommend doing the "Windows Update" driver updates before going to SP1.