XP Pro Reinstal Error - Cannot reformat drive

[afboy0324]

Hello,

I have a dell laptop, I've reinstalled windows xp Pro but didnt reformat the drive the first time which left me with two operating systems at once and no drive space. I cannot install over the current one because it will not let me format the drive, it continues to say something about there are files in \windows that i need to keep to install xp. Any help please???

[nk33]

If I was you I would:

1) Make a bootable windows 98 disk. (If you have floppy, use floppy drive, if not, create a bootable cd-rom with the Win 98 boot files on it0

2) Boot to that disk and get a dos prompt
3)Type fdisk and press enter.
4) Use this program logically to delete all partitions and do a complete format of your whole hard drive.
5) Boot to Win XP cd and install fresh.

[afboy0324]

I do not have a floppy drive...how do i create a windows 98 startup disk?

[nk33]

As you have no floppy drive it will be more difficult

Before we continue, when you get to the bit of windows xp setup that asks you if you want to format your hard drive, what message do you get that stops you from doing this?

[afboy0324]

well actually i found a windows 98 floppy and made a bootable cd of it. I used fdisk to delete the partition but i do not see an option to format the drive. I made a new dos partition and its installing 98 right now...my thought was once that was installed i could upgrade to xp...am i going in the wrong direction?

[afboy0324]

actually now it wont let me instal 98, says setup files are missing...any ideas

[nk33]

you went too far. Once you deleted the partition, all you had to do was create a new non-dos, active partition. It would then ask you to reboot the pc. When you do this, keep the boot disk in and boot to dos. Once this is done, type "format c:" and it will tell you that this will erase all data on the disk. Press y and it will format it for you.

once this is done, you can boot to the xp cd as normal and install xp.

[snooker]

Hi ... Why can't you use your microsoft xp pro disk ? Is this disk from Microsoft or is it an Dell product disk ? If its a Microsoft disk you should be able to boot off that disk just as long as you set the correct boot order in the bios setting