I desperately need some help with the formating and repartitionning of my hard drive!!
I recently purchased a computer which had two partitions on the hard drive along with miscellaneous files and a virus leftover from the previous owner. I decided to read up on the fdisk procedure and then try it out, but I fu#@ed up. Now I have a computer which has had the partitions removed along with all data. I didn’t do a backup because the info and O/S were of no interest to me. I have Windows XP which I would like to install but first I must somehow format the C drive and partition it ( so I’ve read ).
I’ve tried all sorts of boot disks but nothing seems to work. I suspect I have to somehow use DOS to accomplish the formating and partitionning but how do I get it back on my computer? :?:
BTW- The computer is an AMD Athlon 850 Mghz, 256 Mgs of ram . The previous O/S was Windows 98.
Did you try booting off the XP cd? If it’s an older model pc, you might not be able to. In that case you need a floppy boot disk with the cdrom drivers on it, so you can access the cd. You shouldn’t need to format the drive yourself. When installing XP it should format and install itself.
I had a similar experience trying to install a fresh copy of XP after problems with an upgrade installation Jeepers is right, using the XP CD you should be able to format, partition and setup in one swoop.
Do you have access to the CD from DOS? if so just type
cd d: (assuming that d: is your CD_ROM drive)
then type setup.exe
Windows should start installing and asking simple setup questions.
Hope it helps.
You might also want to check your BIOS setup and make sure that your CD drive is enabled as a boot drive. If it’s not, then your PC will never look there for boot files.
The virus may have corrupted the Master Boot Record on the HDD (though I doubt it). Maxtor and Fujitsu do downloadable programs from their websites which will allow you to low-level format your HDD, which will replace the master boot record. Try the other suggestions first though. The Windows 98 Start up floppy disk is all you need - afriend can make one for you. Make sure you have set your BIOS to auto detect your CD Rom drive.
Thanks for all the advice. I was able to get the system up and running by downloading the boot disks from the link one of you provided. I have a “special” version of XP, so I guess the CD boot part of it wasn’t on it. Thanks again.
