formatting XP!?

how do you format windows XP, i knew how to do windows 98 and all that but not XP, any help? thanx

 

Format xp? do you mean reinstall xp? or reformat your entire hd? If you are installing a new operating system the setup will allow you to format which hard drive you choose.

In windows xp, goto start->run, then type in "cmd.exe", and type "format X:\"
So for example, to format my C:\ drive i would type "format C:\".

 

Good question! Are you talking about setting up your desktop to YOUR liking? Or what?

 

Reformatting your hard drive while running XP?

Just put your XP disk in your optical drive and reboot, it will ask you to press any key to boot from CD drive...

Hit your anykey and it will throw you into the XP setup program, just follow the steps, and when you get to the partions step, deleted all your partitions and create a new one. It should ask you if you want to reformat said partition.

 

thanx, i've managed to format my hard drive completly and have installed XP again, apart from this time i can't seem to find a driver for the ethernet connection so i am unable to connect to the internet.....im on another pc at the moment

 

Check out the model number of the LAN card on your mobo, you can use google to find the correct driver.

 

I completely format my PC, as descibed above often.
Gets rid of anything horrible lurking in the background
that you just can't work out or gid rid of, although it's
a last resort option if System restore fails me.

 

yeah mine just had fuckloads of syware on it, and it had some problems too, so i thought formatting was the only way

 

I don't LIKE doing it at all. Reformatting too often has caused hard drives to go bad. Bad Sectors that Defragging can't fix. And it does cause damage to the heads.

 

Why would that happen? You're just marking the disks as being free to write upon.

 

Thats worrying stuff.
I was actually wondering if it had detrimental effects. I would never do it unless it's the very last option. Cheers for letting me know.

 

because you are changing the magnetic state of metal with something that rakes across it's surface, it makes bad sectors,


Btw to my knowledge defrag does nothing to fix broken sectors, scan disk does, defrag only moves the parts of files together

 

I'm ashamed to admit, but I've destroyed a hard drive by reformatting too much. I destroyed the cylyndars.

 

i'd been taught that scandisk didn't 'repair' the disk, so much as it just sections off the damaged part and never uses it again...?

 

What file system is this? During a reformat with FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS the allocation tables are reset so that all sectors are marked as being unsed. None of the data is actually changed. This is why it's so easy to recover files after a reformat.

 

The read/write heads in a hard disk don't even TOUCH the surface, much less "rake across it". They actually "fly" on a cushion of air a few microns above the surface of the platter. The only time they touch the platter is when the drive is powered down, and the heads are moved to the inner track (the "landing zone") before they land on the surface.

There is no logical reason why repeated formatting should damage a drive in any way. It is actually less stressful on a drive than normal operation, because the format is done sequentially, one track at a time, whereas normal operation can have the heads swinging wildly all over the platter to retrieve and write data.

 

saying that hard drives have improved, how bout the newish SATA drives?