Formatting hard drive

Pete.g

How do I do this without balls'ing the pc up altogether?

I can back up anything as I have no burner.

Pete.

Joe_Bloggs

I can see no other fool proof soultion other than buying a new hard disk and CD/DVD burner. They have never been cheaper and you can't mess up a blank hard disk. You can copy what you need from the old disk to the new.
My other tongue in cheek solution is to email your hard disk contents to your self.
J_B.

mrvolleyball

A tip - before you do format it, make sure you have a BOOTABLE Windows CD (if its windows you are putting on).

Without anyway of backing up stuff, I would agree with Joe_Bloggs about the new harddrive. I got one less than a month ago: 160Gb for less than £70.

If you were able to buy one you could then install the harddrive into your computer - as a Master drive. Switch the old drive so its now a slave ( I maybe getting a little technical here and I'm assuming you only currently have 1 harddrive). Then providing you have a bootable Windows CD you can then install windows onto the new one.
Load up Windows and just copy whatever you need from the old harddrive to the new one. (Your old one should be displayed in "My Computer"). You could then safely format your old harddrive.

If you have any questions on this, just ask.

Coldfinger

See http://www.fdisk.com/fdisk/

You must have a bootable floppy disk http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Try the Ultimate Boot Disk which can help you format/set-up your drive for a Windows installation

and for the Ultimate Boot Disk see
http://www.startdisk.com/Web1/ubd/ubd.htm

but even better than that is the Ultimate Boot CD
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Lindburgh

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