Format PC

impecunious

Probably on here somewhere but can't find it.... Anyway, I changed over from Windows XP Home to XP Professional recently with the intention of not only upgrading but also to format my PC. However, I made a right old pigs ear of it and somehow partitioned my hard drive to NTFS (whatever that is) and intstalled XP Professional only on the partitioned bit. Consequently everything else is still on my PC and I have only something like 7% of hard drive space left!!!!!! Would someone please be grateful to inform this idiot on how to do it properly?

T4i

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313348

NTFS is a high-performance and self-healing file system proprietary to Windows XP 2000 NT, which supports file-level security, compression and auditing. It also supports large volumes and powerful storage solution such as RAID.
The most important new feature of NTFS is the ability to encrypt files and folders to protect your sensitive data. It replaces the old FAT32 system.

When you go into the fdisk menu you want to be deleting ALL the partitions on the drive. Be careful if you have more than one HDD because I've seen people delete the wrong drive completely. If you do have a back-up drive or secondary drive go into BIOS and disable it before using fdisk.

Once ALL partitions are deleted you need to create a partition and make it 100% size of your drive. Then reboot and format c:

Then reboot and boot from CD-ROM (XP disk) and install onto the partioned disk. Voila!

culpepper

doesnt the XP disc have some facility for formatting etc?
I seem to remember it asking me if I wanted to format or whatever when I installed from the bootdisc.Its quite a long time since I did it but I dont remember having to do the fdisk thing at all.

-TangleFoot-

culpepper wrote:

doesnt the XP disc have some facility for formatting

Yes. Yes it does; the page linked to above explains how to do it. But that just tells you how to muck around with the partitioning.

FDISK will have nothing to do with it; it's a holdover from the days of DOS, and since that's gone the way of the dodo since Windows 2000, it's no longer of any use. Unless you insist on sticking with the FAT filesystem, that is.

As for installing Windows XP, you might find this guide to be very helpful.

bbb_uk

-TangleFoot- wrote:

...FDISK will have nothing to do with it; it's a holdover from the days of DOS, and since that's gone the way of the dodo since Windows 2000, it's no longer of any use..

That is correct FDisk is from the old days of DOS. It sounds to me that impecunious has two (or more) partitions on his computer (unless he has two actual hard drives) therefore FDISK may be needed to delete the partitions and create one large (full size) partition unless WinXP installation procedure gives you this option - does it - as I can't remember?

-TangleFoot-

bbb_uk wrote:

...unless WinXP installation procedure gives you this option - does it - as I can't remember

Of course it does! T4i has already said as much!

T4i

Yes, fdisk maybe old from the DOS days but it still gets rid of NTFS partitions.

Doing it the fdisk way ensures its done correctly, not a fan of doing it from the XP disk.....

With fdisk you wont end up with an installation of XP over a old installation of XP.