Simviation Forums

How can I wipe Windows XP off my hard drive and start afresh. Cannot re- format because I have formatted as NTFS.
If I put another Hard drive in and put the old one as slave, will I be able to clear it that way.

Reason for this is after trying to
recover the system because of problems, I now have two O/S on board, and still not running as good as I once had it before my son got at it!!!!

I have been through the Restore stuff. I am going to buy another drive and put XP on that and store all my stuff on the slave as I did on the old Comp.
Really getting P****d off now.  :'(

Please help!!!!

Tony

I take it you want to wipe the drive completely.

You could go to the HD manufacturers website and download the the disk utilities - you can put that on a floppy and boot into a utility screen. From here you can run a low level reformat which will wipe the drive to the factory disk data (ie loads of 0's).

I don't understand why you can't reformat NTFS. During an XP installation you can delete the exsisting partitions and create  new ones, what does NTFS have to do with it?

If you have a copy of dos on floppy disk, you can also use the floppy disk that comes with win98.  Just boot from this, and use the fdisk command not the format command.  This will wipe the hard-drive regardless of what is on it.  Trying to use the format command causes it to get confused as to what is on the drive and stops it formatting.  I have tried both methods and fdisk definetly works.

You need to be in dos, use the boot disk to do this.
type fdisk, this will bring a list of options, i believe it is option three as far as i remember, this deletes the whole partition aka the data on the hard-drive.  Each number has information next to it, so if it not #3 it will be obvious which one it is.

As Bird-Man says NTFS has nothing to do with it.  Just select to boot up off of your XP CD and when the option arrises just delete the partition with your OS on.  Then re-create it.

You might have to go into the Bios of your motherboard and tell it to boot off of the CD before the hard disk, other than that as long as you have a valid XP cd you should be able to format it using either fat32, or ntfs...:-)

 ;) Thanks for all the replies chaps,

In for a penny in for a pound  ;)

Going for it

Tony

PS... the bit I mentioned about partitioning and formatting was because when I tried to re-install from the CD I could not alter the partition as set and it informed me certain files would be retained.

Boot up from CD in your BIOS, I prefer to wipe my HD & have no partitions at all. A clean sweep is best in my opinion. I can flatten my PC & have XP pro installed in less than 1 hour.