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General discussion

wipe hard drive

Feb 28, 2004 5:48AM PST

Is there an easy way to wipe out my hard drive and start over?

Discussion is locked

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Re:wipe hard drive
Feb 28, 2004 6:05AM PST

Boot up from your XP cd, choose a new install, choose the existing partition where your present install is, format and reinstall. A restore disk will follow a similar course. Of course you back up to an external source what you don't want to lose first.

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Re:wipe hard drive
Feb 29, 2004 4:05AM PST

If I go into dos and format the hard drive will I then be able to reinstall windows xp? I have tried reinstalling xp and all I accopmlished was adding another user to xp. What I would like to do is get rid of everything on the hard drive and start over with windows. Any sugjestions except blowing it up???

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Re:Re:wipe hard drive
Feb 29, 2004 4:30AM PST

"If I go into dos and format the hard drive"

DOS is not a component of XP, but if you like you may boot to a Win98 disk, use FDISK to delete your partitions. Then I would boot from the XP cd and let Windows do its thing.
For deleting difficult partitions you can use >>http://www.russelltexas.com/delpart.htm

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Re:Re:wipe hard drive
Feb 29, 2004 4:30AM PST

The guaranteed way to ensure that the HDD is formatted during the set up is to use the option to delete your partition.
Then create a new partition and you will then have to format the partition before XP can proceed with the installation.

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FYI, see this link..
Feb 29, 2004 4:34AM PST
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Re:Re:Re:wipe hard drive
Mar 2, 2004 7:42AM PST

Ok anouther question. If i go into DOS and delete the partition. Then format the HDD will I then be able to install XP back on my puter? Since I dont have the option of deleting that partition when I try to reinstall XP it tells me cannot perform that function.