Having formatting problems

[Gradyd164]

I tried formatting my friends hp 933mz 40 harddisk with windows XP he wanted to format the computer to clean it out and put back the windows Xp but when i put the xp pro cd it doesnt show format so i went to dos prompt nad tried the old fashion way but it tells me the c drive is lock by a utility or something like that can some one give me some help here thank you very much

[augie2]

Did you change your BIOS to boot from CD and booted from CD? I don't think you can format without booting.

Also,make a 5GB partition just for XP and install your apps to D: so if you scrap XP, you will only have to reinstall your apps and not have to reload. Also you won't lose data.

augie

[Zitchta]

I'd suggest booting from CD and performing a destructive restore (choosing to format the drive as NTFS or FAT32, not quick format, full one).

OR

Boot off a win98 boot disk, boot with or without CDROM support. Then at the A: prompt, type in

format c:

it will then format the drive, and you can do a re-install of XP.

-Z

[Gradyd164]

Tried to boot of win98 boot disk but nothing I restart comp. with boot disk in and win xp keeps coming up tried it a coupleof times nothing then tried to go to my control panel add/remove and thats blank theres nothing in it very desperate right now please help

[sniperfav]

go into the bios and set it to boot from the cd. then restart with the scd in the rom and you will see a promt that asks

boot from cd... press any key

then hit a key and from there its butter and grapes lol