Ahoy Congo & N.Nick

[luke]

To cap your very good info in the "PC shutdown & SOBD" post, please clear my dilemma.

For a long time used FDISK, then freebee PMagic 4 & 5 made it easy but went out with XP, then came freebee MaxBlast.

This XP CD bootup troubles me. Does not seem as flexible and not always the make partition / delete / format thing shows up.

How can you get it to give a clean slade 160gb HD, then start building it up like fdisk for instance.

Your offer to consolidate on nLite, when you have time will be appreciated.

I am sure I undestand it and yet not all the clicked to green dots options turn up (ie updates) when the progress gets on the way.     Thanx    luke

[NicksFXHouse]

I do not use nLite so Congo will need to jump in on that one...

as for a clean slate... go to the website for the hard drive and you should find in the support area a file designed for DOS utilities which will also boot the computer in DOS. Some manufactures offer a floppy disk version and a CD version which requires CD burn software that will read and burn an ISO file.

Boot the computer with the floppy or CD and the utilities will also boot..

If your copy of Windows has SP2 incorporated into the install disk, all you need to do is perform a ZERO write to the drive.. in other words, have the software fill the drive with zero's. There is usually a 'quick' and a 'full' method. The full method may take an hour or more but will ensure no critters or viruses are left on the drive.

I typically run the quick method.

After that, if you wish to partition the disk (which I do not suggest for a boot drive unless you must have it) you can use the same DOS software to prepare the disk with a partition and NTFS format.

If your Windows disk does NOT have at least SP1 incorporated into it, you MUST partition the drive temporarily until after SP2 is installed from an update. The size of the Windows boot partition can not be greater than 137GB or data corruption will occur... you only need to make a partition of less than 137GB if your Windows install disk does NOT have SP1 incorporated into it. There are rare cases when a version of Windows may have a very early version of SP1 that does not have large disk access support. It is rare but it does happen. If you have a very old version of Windows and are unsure about SP1 it is best to do the 137GB (or less) drive partition until you get SP2 installed and updated.

After SP2 is installed and updated you can use partition magic to recover the leftover unallocated disk space and merge it back into the main partition.

If you completely prepare the hard drive in the DOS disk utilities and had the DOS software format it in NTFS, you can skip the format process in Windows setup because the disk is ready to go.


Here is the basic list you should follow when installing Windows. You may already know this or most of it however the BIOS and Windows settings that get your system hopping are secondary to the install process.  

You should make sure you have the latest BIOS installed for your system and makes sure the BIOS is set up correctly (NO OVERCLOCKING) before installing Windows.

Always install Windows on a NTFS format. FAT32 is worthless for performance and security.
 
 1.
Install Windows. When complete and at the new desktop wait about 3-5 minutes and simply reboot. This ensures anything that may have been caught in the buffers and did not complete during the first run, will finish.
 
 2.
Install the motherboard (chipset) drivers.  
 
 Reboot after install.
 

NOTE: If you have a processor driver from AMD or Intel, install it after the motherboard driver has been installed and you have rebooted the system...


NOTE: FOR DUAL CORE PROCESSORS

[luke]

Will stay put for now, and at first upset will try all said in both posts.

I have XP PRP SP2, but how to get to the format bit and the zeroizing?                           luke