Ok its a real long sotry but to cut it short, I'm going to reformat my hard drive. I have heard this is quite simple but could anyone help me out because I dont know where to begin. I have my windows disk and code and everything I want on my external hard drive. Ok so I put in the wondows CD and make it so it boots up to that. I got into windows setup and it will say Loading Windows something or other like it should and BAM blue screen of death. I have no clue what to do. Is it possiable to just goto Run and type "Format C:" let it go and then when its done pop in my windows install disk? If I do that will I be able to reinstall windows? Any help is GREAT. Thanks EDIT: It is windows xp with SP2. Now, when I got my computer it dident come with a wondows disk so I have to use my brothers. His is SP1. So I am going down. I have my own code though.
Are you sure it's a BSOD (Blue screen of death)? It does look quite like it, but if you read it, it might well give you instructions on how to reinstall windows. As for Start, Run and Format C:, that will not work, because you cannot "delete windows" whilst you are using windows.
Its a blue screen of death. It goes on saying "there is an rror, if this is the first time you have seen this try again...." Im not sure Ill keep messing around and see if I can get this stright.
If you can't boot windows and run the recovery programme that probably came with your computer, see if you can put your hard drive in someone elses computer, and format it there. When it's in (as a second hard drive), right click your drive in my computer and click format.
get a windows boot diskette, windows 98 will do. boot up with the floppy disk and the type format C: it will format the drive for you.
I think win98 bootdisk doesnt support NTFS....which is more secured way of formatting a HDD and I dont think if there is any difference between formatting a HDD by floppy or CD. As per the Formating of drive, it seems that there are some bad sectors on the drive. Is it possible for you to check it on the other computer?
but when he loads the cd, he gets BSOD so it makes sense to use a floppy, well anyway i find it easier to do it this way if something like this happens
Check to make sure that you're CD isn't scratched. You could format using a Win98 disk, and then try the XP setup again. If it then works you could quick format to NTFS.
just boot from a Win98 boot disk downloaded from here yes as Karan said 98 is not compatible with NTFS then use fdisk to delete all partitions then reboot and boot from CD i would also seriously consider slipstreaming your XP SP1 CD, to make an XP SP2 CD
even if the bootdisk doesn't support NTFS, when you delete all partitions, you would be able to format the drive from the win cd using the NTFS format.
have you got any partitions. This is what made my format reistall a nightmare. I would use the old fdisk command using the win98 cd. It works every time
