Formatting the drive on a XP machine

[wysiwyg]

Having had various problems with my machine and then a virus which got past my (updated) Norton Antivirus :mad: I have decided to format the hard disk on my Windows XP machine. I used an old Windows 98 floppy to boot to an 'A:' dos prompt but when I type 'format c:' I get a reply saying 'cannot format network drive'. Under the networking options I have tried pressing 'disconnect network drive' but the reply is 'you are not connected to any network drives'. My machine (P4 2 gig, XP, 256 SDRAM, 40 gigHD) has a network card built into the motherboard but I have no cable attached and do not use networking.

Mayday!
wizzy

[wysiwyg]

Thanks aisleman, that gives me something to get going with. My CD is a manufacturers recovery disk (using Norton Ghost) rather than a conventional XP disk, will this still enable me to chose the options you refer to?

regards
wizzy

[FLEX42]

wysiwyg, I had to format from manufacturers recovery cd's after I'd changed the file system to NTFS, and wanted to go back to FAT32 as it's faster (ok that's another debate). Don't know if your drive is partitioned, mine was, so I copied all that I needed to C, then formatted D using recovery cd's. Then put what I wanted on D, and formatted C. All hunky dory now back on Fat32, so you should be able to do it as aisleman suggests, just back up everything you need first.

ps. Remember, any window updates, patches, driver updates etc will need reloading afterwards.

Edited for ps. :)

[wysiwyg]

Many thanks gents. I'm a bit pooped at the moment (night flight to the Canaries) so will have a bash at this tomorrow. Will report back.

Regards
wizzy