Damn HD won't reformat, WinXP-Pro still comes up.

S

Schmev

Veteran X
I've tried a half dozen methods of trying to wipe my C: partition out. It's set at 10GB, and no matter which method I've used, it goes through the progress bar saying it's reformatting, but when the computer reboots, it doesn't even bother to reinstall, just to my old desktop and old programs.

I've tried various bootdisks and none of them helped. Only thing I can think of is to delete the C:\Windows directory, but nothing let's me do that. I'm assuming after "reformatting" the computer somehow undeletes everything I had formatted. I can't even rename the directory for god sake. And because of NTFS, none of the boot disks I make let me either.

Fdisk doesn't even work, saying it's an incorrect version of DOS. Thought maybe it could at least format from bootdisk. Any help on getting XP to actually reformat instead of just saying it did and then loading my old fucked up installation?

I can't stand this anymore! I spent two days trying to get the fucker reformatted, only to babysit the progress bar and watch it outright lie to me when it's "finished". I told my sister in law she could use my computer while I took my family out of town on vacation last week. She said she wanted to print up some resumes to get a job. I came back and found fuckin' new toolbars on IE. She insisted she didn't install anything. I called bullshit and grilled her for it and she confessed she was on late night looking at sites for naked men and clicked Yes to install "something" otherwise "it wouldn't let me see the pics". :fu: Now I keep getting fucking weird popups and shit when I'm not even on the web. God only knows what else is in here now.

Help me reformat this damn thing plz thx!
 
Put the drive in another machine and do it that way or win98 bootdisk and fdisk. If you try and format it you can't because it is ntfs. Use fdisk from a 98 bootdisk and tell it to delete the non-dos partition. Then partition it and format it. Install XP. Done.
 
boot of XP disk, go to install OS, delete existing partitions, install on new partition? It should then ask to format the partition in FAT or NTFS.
 
Damn SATA drives are picky as hell. I reformatted nearly a dozen times with various methods, watched the progress bar slowly climb to 100%, say it was successful and such, then had XP install itself countless times and they all came up as my previous install I tried to erase.

Thanks for the suggestions though. I was hoping for another way around it, but I wound up gutting a 10G drive out of one of my closet boxes and installing to that, reformatting the SATA from directly in windows, unplug the shitty 10 gigger, and proceed to format yet again (just to be sure) and WinXP installed just fine this way. but twice during this install ordeal i was asked upon boot up to reinstall HAL.DLL, piss me off :( WinXP... I've never seen a more difficult OS to install!! I never ever had a hitch dealing with my Win98SE back in the day.

I hereby declare this thread finished. Thank you.
 
ummm, windows xp asks you if you want to just reinstall the system components and keep the files and settings you have, or if you want to wipe everything... are you making sure your actually deleting the partition and making a new one?
 
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