Reformatting my hard drive

[Mikey4eva]

Hey all, hope you can help. My rig crashed about a week ago, so I installed Windows XP onto my hard drive again over the first one....so it is taking up twice as much space, etc. Plus... i have two boot logs...and it is crashing, and not recognizing my roxio burning software. I asked the guy who built my computer and he said i had to reformat my hard drive and do a clean install. The only problem is is that i dont know how to reformat a hard drive. Does this mean EVERYTHING is gonna get deleted and my space is gonna go back up? i got a 120 gb hard drive right now and it is showing 80 and I know I didnt use THAT MUCH YET! lol So if anyone can please help i'd appreciate it. Thanks, mike

[Force Flow]

Welcome to PCMech, Mikey4eva! ;)

If you format, yes, you will loose everything. Formatting will completely wipe the drive.

What you could to is connect you HDD as a slave in another system, move all the files you need onto that HDD temporarily, then format the drive.

[Mikey4eva]

Actually, I WANT TO delete everything on the drive. I want to start fresh...do clean installs of everything. Ok so what do i do? do I just stick the xp disk in? Or do I have to do something special first....

[Tuf]

Just set your boot order in the bios to boot from the CDROM drive. Put your XP disc in and go for it. You can partition and format the drive from there. It's very easy just follow the directions on the screen.

[Mikey4eva]

lolol! see you're confusing me already...i dont even know how to set the boot order in the bios to boot from the cd drive. please help! im so lost!

[wintomato]

Hi Mikey
when starting your computer, you should see something on the screen telling you to "Press F2 to enter setup" When pressed during start, F2 should task you through to a BIOS setup screen. Depending on your BIOS you should see an option that says "Boot Sequence" use you cursor keys to go down to that selection and press enter (or whatever it tells you ) to enter that area, you should then see instructions on how to put the CD Rom to the top of the list in the boot sequence.
Now when you exit and save changes with the winxp cd in the drive it should start from there, with a menu that asks if you want to do a fresh installation. choose that, then you should see a screen about partitions, select whatever partitions you see and delete them, then create one and do a fresh installation on that new partition of winxp. The rest should be fairly simple to follow.
Good luck and welcome to the forums, there are plenty of great knowledgeable people on here.