I want to format my hard drive ( been two years ) ! It is now running XP Pro, which I do not have the discs, and I want to switch back to XP Home, which I have one disc that came with the computer !I've tried booting up with the disk, so that I can format my hard drive, but nothing happens!
How does one go about formatting the hard drive?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI'm formatting my hard drive and re-installing XP, and I'm wondering if I can delete the system partition without any adverse effects to the system. When I try to delete it from the XP Setup disk, it warns me not to do it, but I'm trying to create a larger partition for the system. Can I delete the system partition and create a new one.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI got a new system assembled a month back and after 15 days the stop error began to happen (this was after my bro tried to transfer files from his iPod & it didn't happen). I looked up a lot of forums but didn't find this one and couldn't figure out what the problem might be. Restored system, disabled services, but nothing worked. Finally I got the C: drive formatted and Win XP SP2 reinstalled. Didn't install unnecessary/extra software this time. But I found this site a day before getting it formatted, so saved the last 5 minidump files. And the day after the reinstallation, it has started happening again. The first time it was the bcmndis.sys file -- Airtel Beetel 220bx modem -- connected with the USB; couldn't find another driver for it online.
View 7 Replies View RelatedThis is my DAD's personal computer now, we are trying to format his hard drive i get to the point where it asks me whether i want to proceed, i put yes and hit enter, it then doesn't start formatting, it just say C:WINDOWS?
View 5 Replies View RelatedFitted an extra HDD to my machine. Detected in bios but XP will not find it. Drive is unformatted (new), how do you format in windows XP. It was easy in 98SE, just go to dos, fdisk then format. How do you do this in XP?
View 6 Replies View RelatedI know theres heaps of partition and format tools out there to help you do certain things, but what i was wondering is instead of formatting the old fashioned way, and losing everything, is there a way i can format and not lose anything, so i dont have to do a million re installs? my hard drive is partitioned NTFS. and i have my C: where all my windows files are stored seperate to all my other drives.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI have been trying to format my hard drives. I tried using Device Manager, it let me format my E drive, but not the C drive, and then I tried by booting with the XP CD. Somehow I managed to install Windows on my E drive, and my C drive is still as it was. I have been following the instructions on how to format and install to the letter, but it's not happening for me. All of the screens match what the instructions say, but the result is nothing.I have searched this forum for HD/XP advice, and have done as suggested, no luck.How do I format my C drive, and start again?
View 8 Replies View RelatedThis forum has been incredibly helpful, and now I must ask another "ignorant" question to maintain my computer loving insanity. I recently acquired a used laptop running XP Home. I use Pro for work, so I thought it wise to install Pro over the top of the the former owners' OS and thereby effectively delete his old files etc. Well, what I found was that Windows simply imported the old OS info right into the new install, leaving folders, files and programs I didn't want on the hard drive. So my question for you guys and gals is this. How do I destroy everything on my hard drive, then make the laptop (without floppy drive available), accept the reloading of my XP Pro CD? It is a full OEM version by the way. If I can format the HD, and have BIOS boot from CD-ROM, will I have a "fresh" CD-only install at that point, or will there still be little goblins of information running around in my system
View 14 Replies View RelatedI am having a problem understanding when I load windows xp pro.before I did it without no problems,what I mean by that is my hard drives.I have two of them both are 500gb.one I had for avid editing and the c drive for other stuff like software.I guess I just got lucky before.I had both of them 500gb.but what I need to know please remember I am not a genius
View 4 Replies View Relatedi just installed windows xp pro i had layin around just for the hell of it, and it turns out that it had SP0. my internet connection is extremely slow at the moment so it would be painful to download service pack 2. i have a winxp home cd that has SP2 included on that. is there anyway i can install it off that, with out formatting and using XP home?
View 6 Replies View RelatedOn my pc, I had one drive with Windows 98 on it, and one drive with Windows XP on it
Windows 98 was on drive C: XP was on D: They were set up so I could choose which one to boot to at start up I wanted to get rid of the 98 entirely, so I edited the boot ini, just removing the entry for windows 98 after restarting the computer, everything was fine....going directly to XP so I wanted to format the 98 drive so I could use it as additional storage, which I did using norton partition magic, I then shut down my computer......turned it back on.....and I get an error saying: NTLDR is missing.
I was posting some pictures to a bird forum last night and when I tried opening a folder I was told that the hard drive, c:, was nor formatted and asked whether I wished to format it. Naturally I clicked on No and tried to contain my mounting panic. I defragmented the hard drive and was told that the defragmentation process was successful apart from 123 Kb in My Pictures - I'm assuming this refers to the problem folder though originally that contained a lot more data. The files are all backed up so I tried to delete the folder but was told this was not possible as the "catalogue is not empty". In the end I just renamed the folder "Black Hole" in case I click at the wrong time and accidently reformat the harddrive. Under Windows 98 I would have run Scan Disk to see whether there was physical damage to the harddrive and repair or at least isolate the damaged section. As I recall that's not possible with XP. I thought of restoring an earlier configeration but I'm not sure when the problem arose. I really have 2 questions.
1. Is there a likelyhood of a serious problem with the harddrive?
2. How can I get rid of the folder and prevent the same thing from happening again? I'm not sure if it's relevant but I have a dsl connection with a firewall from Zone Labs, a virus progamme (McAfee) and I regularly scan the harddrive using Spybot and Adaware.
Will a format of HD. and re-install xp create a new registry?
View 2 Replies View RelatedYeah I have reformatted my hard drives a few times over the years so I am no stranger to it however I am just curious about something. When I go to reformat with my DELL Windows XP Home Edition CD I will then revert back to SP1. I have SP3 installed onto my computer right now. I also have a SP2 CD I got from Microsoft about 3 years ago or so. Should I first install the SP2 cd or is there no need to do that seeing SP3 should have all of SP2 updates in it?
View 7 Replies View RelatedMy hp dvd 1140i will not burn my movies it keeps saying that the disc needs formatting.
View 1 Replies View RelatedHow can I unformat a flash drive? I formatted it to make it bootable to try to run feather linux which didn't work. Anyway, I am trying to get it back to where it was before. I tried HP's usb format utility, but it doesn't see it as it won't even show up in my computer. it does show up as a storage device to unplug but that is all.
View 11 Replies View RelatedI need to know if I can take a drive out of my friend's tower, and put it in my tower as a slave drive to format it, will it be a bootable drive back in my friend's tower? Or will it still read as a slave drive with no OS files? I have to do this because my friend lost his Win XP Pro SP1 disk, and all I have is a Win XP Pro disk with no SP on it, I have a separate downloaded SP1 file, but if I try to use that, it will chop their harddrive from 200 gigs down to 130'ish, like it did with my 160 gig drive Or maybe I could create a new Windows install CD with SP1 on it already.
View 2 Replies View Relateda few days ago i had a problem performing a clean install of Windows XP which is on another thread Link below:
URL...I now have managed to install XP on my 60GB drive but when i try to format my 400gb SATA drive i cannot. BIOS Sees my SATA drive and windows XP sees the drive as Unallocated. I tried formatting it in windows and Partition Magic 8 and both times windows seems to crash and hangs and there is nothing i can do but reboot to get back into windows.
I friend of mine is working on my pc for me. I'm putting in a new main HD (since mine crapped out) it's 80G. I also have a new 320G backup HD that he's putting in. Well he's got everything going and XP pro loaded up but says that he normally formats a drive with a program off a floppy. My PC doesn't have a floppy drive nor does the MB support one. He said he used XP to format the drive (which he's never used XP to format a drive) and the BIOS is saying 320G is there but windows is saying only 8G is there. Any idea what's wrong?
View 14 Replies View RelatedI have a Dell computer where one of the loading .dll files came up 'missing' one day, so it won't boot. I want to get all the photos and other docs off the hard drive. I had downloaded one version of linux and was able to see the files on the internal hard drive, but was unable to copy them to a memory stick or external hard drive. Now I've downloaded ubuntu and booted off a memory stick... this time, it's telling me that the internal hard drive has all kinds of bad sectors and won't let me access any of the files on there.
View 1 Replies View Relatedi had to purchase a new hard drive due to multiple errors on my hard drive. My brand new drive is the same exact model as my old one but when i try to install xp on the new drive i get as far as formatting the drive and the computer shuts off and wont turn back on. I have to unplug it, let it sit for a little but and then plug it back in and it will start up again.
View 14 Replies View Relatedwe have an XP box at work we use for testing custom apps we create...we threw in an extra drive and put Vista on this drive just to test out our apps...after testing, we removed the drive (and hence Vista) leaving just the main drive with XP...our boot options still list Vista as a boot option..i know fixmbr works with XP, but there is another command (can't remember what it is, never used it) for Vista...using XP, can i use the fixmbr command to remove the Vista boot option? if not, how should i remove the second boot option from XP?
View 7 Replies View RelatedI may have to reformat my entire hard drive and reinstall a totally new, legal copy of either Windows XP Home SP2 or Pro SP2. Do NOT ask me how I know this! IF I want to format c:, what's the right process and sequence for doing this, and then reinstalling Windows from a CD?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI have 3 hard drives, one 40 gig, one 20 gig and a 160 gig, i have xp professional on the 40 gig and i use the 160 gig for all my game.What i want to do is put windows millennium on the 20 gig hard drive, is it possible without formatting my other drive and create a dual booting system.
View 4 Replies View RelatedHope this all makes sense... To cut a long story short, i have ended up with 2 versions of XP on the same partition of my hard drive. I know this is always a bad idea but it wasn't me who did it! The person who installed both also partitoned my hard drive into two sections, 40gb and 20gb....so i now have XP pro and XP Home installed on the same partition. Anyway i used partition magic to merge the 2 sections together as it was confusing issues.
Basically- What i want to do is start fresh with one working version of Windows XP Pro on my computer. I've tried inserting the XP Pro CD and telling it to install a fresh copy, overwriting all other versions of windows- but it has only overwritten XP Home and i'm left with 2 versions of XP Pro, and my computer asks me which one i want to start on start-up. So how should i go about removing one of the versions? Would formatting my C-Drive do the trick, followed by installing XP Pro from the CD again?
I recently had a few problems on my laptop, so I reinstalled windows without formatting the drive. Now I guess the windows cd I used had already been installed on my other computer leaving me unable to log on to my laptop because windows thinks my product key is "invalid" and won't activate. So is there any way I could undo this installation of XP leaving the old working one?
View 13 Replies View RelatedAfter formatting my drive recently (XP Laptop) some of the keys do not produce the character indicated.
For example:
shift 2 should be " but is now @ '
i have lost the symbols for the pound and euro currency completely and a few otheres are changed also
I will be formatting my drive now and I want to install XP and Vista so that I can choose which one to load at the start of booting up. How would I do this? Do I need to create two partitions, install both operating systems on the separate drives and then done? Or is there more to it? Which operating system should I install first, if there is any difference
View 1 Replies View RelatedThis is the problem I'm faced with and don't know what to do from here. After deleting current partition and then formatting in NTSF file system, it goes through the process of preparing for installation. When it reboots, it says the following:"couldn't open drive multi(0) disk(0) rdisk(0) partition(1)NTLDR: couldn't open drive multi(0) disk(0) rdisk(0) partition(1)"If I take the XP CD out it just has blank screen with blinking cursor in the top left corner.
View 11 Replies View RelatedI attached a hard drive as a slave to my computer and I went to command prompt and formatted the drive using format d:.When I put the hard drive back into another computer as the master drive, I get an error message saying "NTLDR is missing" in command prompt. I tried to search on google, but I can only find solutions for systems that already have Windows installed on it.I changed the boot device priority in the BIOS, but I still couldn't get the Windows XP to boot.
View 10 Replies View Related