reformattng XP{ harddrive

[dreamcatcher79]

is there any difference in reformatting a hard drive on 98 and XP? does anyone know a good tutorial for reformatting a hard drive on XP?

[avdven]

How are you reformatting it? Are you using FDISK, the formatting engine built into Windows XP setup or another, third-party program?

AJ

[TechieChick]

XP is a bootable cd, just set your bios to boot to the cd, drop it in the drive and follow the onscreen directions.

[dreamcatcher79]

well now heres the problem, Im not sure i have the xp cd, it just came pre installed on my comp =/

[Mahakaal]

XP is running an NTFS file system, whereas Win98 runs on FAT or FAT32.
NTFS can read FAT/FAt32 files,but it doesn't work the other way around last time I checked, so you might want to keep that in mind.

[Faqt]

I have an upgrade cd for windows xp...formatting is a cinch, if yours lets you do the same thing, just begin the xp installation process....there should come a point when it shows all the existing partitions their sizes...etc. You can reformat, partition etc. from the screen.

[Und3ertak3r]

here is a botch..

some manufacturers preinstall XP-home using FAT32 (or is that crap32), and their Image disks will only reimage the hdd as FAT32.. ouch.. I am not aware of a work around as yet, others may be aware of a way..

but that isn't helping the problem here..

Sry

Cheers

[rcgreen]

My first question is, why do you think you need to
reformat your hard drive?

[paulcottingham]

If you are preinstalled with FAT32 or want to change to NTFS you can convert the filesystem to NTFS with the command convert {drive letter:} /FS:NTFS Its a one way change though and not wildly helpful for anyone with a multiboot system. www.sysinternals.com have NTFS drivers for most M$ os's that dont natively support it if you want to use them but obviously not for the boot partition unless you were planning to use it as a doorstop.

There are benefits in terms of fault tolerance, security {potentially anyway} and speed when using NTFS on drives over 1Gb i could waffle on for hours about the why's and wherefore's but im sure someone here will have already done it at length far more eloquently than i ever could

Paul

[lord_darkside_x]

i formatted a hard drive that ran xp, but the way i ended up doing it was quite unconventional...

i booted up with a win 98 boot disk in, and that took me to a command prompt. then i just did format c: -s because the command.com on the boot disk still allowed format. there are a lot of other ways to do it (although xp makes it a lot harder to format then the old os's) but i was just playing around and foiund this way worked as well.