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Resolved Question

Help formatting xp plz

Sep 7, 2011 5:44AM PDT

ok i got a old amd 850 mhz pc. setting it up for a freind who cant afford one. he only is gonna use it for craigslist nd basic emails so im sure itll be plenty. the problem is it is full of adware viruses and other things and i cant seem to get it to format. i changed the options in advance bios for the cd rom to be the first boot option. whenever i select to boot from disc its the second choice and the keyboard stops working making the highlighted choice of boot from harddrive run. also i have 2 windows xp discs ones a oem from miscrosoft bought in a box from best buy when it was new, have a second burned copy with a patch to deactivate the activation prompt but neither one will auto run or can be found in my disc drives. if i pop win98se in it auto runs but wont let me open anything on the disc. ive also tried buring a iso image of dban nuke but that didnt work either. id really like to format this drive instead of buying a new harddrive any help is appricated. thnx

Discussion is locked

b3sT_iN_th3_W0rLd has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer

Best Answer

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Sounds Like You Need A New DVD/CD Drive
Sep 7, 2011 5:58AM PDT

We frequently find problems with older computers which have failed DVD/CD drives.. Replacement of such is required so they can boot from that drive. Once that's done, you should be able to burn the Dban image to the disc (hopefully, you know how to burn an "image" to the disc and not just burn the actual .iso file to the disc) and you should be able to

As far as installing the operating system, it looks like BOTH of your OS discs may be bound to fail. Unless the OEM disc has never been used and isn't designed for a specific computer model, the OEM disc will generally only install and function on the computer make and model it came with.. If it's preset for a specific computer, it won't recognize the hardware on a different computer and it's always going to have issues, even if you can get it to install. On the other the other hand, if it's a new OEM disc that's never been used, then you might get it to work with a functioning drive. Afterward, you would need to find and install all the correct drivers.

As far as the use of anything other than a fully legal version of XP (the disc with the anti-activation patch is NOT within Microsoft's EULA), we won't be discussing such on these forums.. It's against forum policies and such discussions are removed.

Hope this helps.

Grif

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more $$ then the cpu is worth lol
Sep 7, 2011 6:13AM PDT

im sorry i phrased somethings wrong, by oem disK i meant like the box from microsoft containing the activation code etc, like if u went to best buy and bought windows. i have a laptop that i burnt the dban onto a cd with but i used the auto program that pops up as i chose to open not save. my apologizes as im pretty green when it comes to cpus, the disc burnt as a iso file as i thought that would be a copy of the cd image and just as usefull. should i save dban and burn it in differnt format? i have multiple format burning programs for virtually any file type just not sure what to make it. something like a data cd with all the contents of the dban folder copied to a disk? is there any way to download dban on my old desktop and nuke it from there?

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And .iso Image File Is Burned To a Disc..
Sep 7, 2011 7:17AM PDT

...using a burning program which is able to extract all the files from the .iso and burn them to the disc.The .iso file is not burned as a "data" file but as an image file. Once Dban is burned correctly to the disc, it creates a bootable disc from which you can wipe the drive. See the instructions below:

http://www.dban.org/faq/burning

And a "Best Buy" version of Windows XP is no longer available at the store.. If you happen to have a brand new box with a full version of XP inside and an unused product key, then things should work fine. If the DVD/CD drive is working as it should, then you can use the XP disc to delete all old partitions, recreate a new one, format the partition, and install the operating system.

Hope this helps.

Grif

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got it
Sep 7, 2011 9:12AM PDT

well i put a new dvd drive in, not new one that was used but still a upgrade as the cpu had a old cd and cdrw drives. got it to boot from cd, fresh install of windows xp works as it should, thanks for your help grif.