Formatting a hard disk with XP

[tony draper]

Err how does one go about formatting a hard disk that has a half completed install of XP upon it?
Mate of mine was given a hard disk with xp installed,it had a lot of stuff on it he did not want so I changed the boot device to the floppy in bios and formated it using a win 98 boot disk,so far so good,next tried to do a new instal from his XP CD, but it was not a bootable disc,so I load ed win 98 back on then tried to upgrade,it got halfway throught the instal and reported there was not enough disk space? tiz a forty gig disk.
Seems the disk space is being wrongly supported.
Is there such a thing as a boot disk for XP?similar to the win 98 rescue disk? ie one that has the format command, fdisk, chdsk ect,so I can start from scratch,format the disk then do a clean XP install?
Any help gratefully accepted been fannying with the buggah for about six hours.
:confused:

[bjkeates]

You say the Win XP CD was not a bootable CD (I assume that's what you mean.) Try booting into DOS using the Win 98 boot disk, then changing to your CD drive at the command prompt (usually by typing D: \ [without the space there - damn smilies!] or whatever your drive letter is) and running the Win XP CD from there (type setup and press enter). Unless it's an upgrade-only CD it should still install on a clean hard disk, it doesn't have to be bootable.

Windows 95 and (I believe) the first edition of 98 didn't support disk sizes of greater than 2GB - i remember when I ran Windows 95 all those years ago and had a 10GB hard drive put in, it had to be split into 5 partitions to be usable. If you've got an old copy of Windows 98, that may be your problem.

[tony draper]

Thank you Mr Keets I know the various ways of installing windows from CD or using boot disk.
I am begining to suspect it was indeed a win 95 boot disk I had a similar thing happen as you describe a few years ago,I just want to return the hard disk to the size it should be then format it, install windows 98 then ugrade it with the XP disk which is what I did with my own puter no probs
I normally have a few win 98 boot disks with the format command one em but sods law the only one I can find does not have the dos command format,just the fdisk command,
:confused:
Nowts simple.:uhoh:
Panic over,just got a call from me pa,l he finaly managed to get XP loaded and running at 2 am,one shall go over and load all his drivers then all we have to do is get his broadband up and running

[twiggs]

Go to http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/and create your own boot CD.
These days floppy drives are becoming extinct so this tool is particularly helpful for all sorts of problems that bootable floppys used to fix.

[tony draper]

Thanks chaps its ok,been across and started from scratch,now have xp successfully installed,however I cannot get his machine to connect to jis broadband via the ethernet socket,dont have the option of using usb,because the blueyonder disk defaults to ethernet,its a secondhand machine and I begin to suspect the ethernet facility is buggad,we managed to get in for about three minutes yesterday but no luck today,the machine cannot find the broadband modem,gonna take my puter across and try that.