Reformatting Problems

[Spunk]

Continuation of thread "Formatting C: Frustration."

To reformat, do I need to boot to the CD or can I run setup from the CD drive? Booting from the CD is where I am having the problem. Also, I couldn't delete the C: partition because it said that some temporary files were needed on that drive. It is possible that I deleted the non-DOS partition, how would I know?

MJS

[Statica]

Originally Posted by Spunk Continuation of thread "Formatting C: Frustration." To reformat, do I need to boot to the CD or can I run setup from the CD drive? Booting from the CD is where I am having the problem. Also, I couldn't delete the C: partition because it said that some temporary files were needed on that drive. It is possible that I deleted the non-DOS partition, how would I know? MJS

Thanx for openning the new thread.
You will need to reboot from CD to run setup. As an alternative, does your floppy drive boot? If so you can use XP setup disks from floppies (it's 6 floppies). The boot disks are available for download from www.bootdisk.com or from www.microsoft.com

To check your current partition table, you will first need to enter the recovery console and then run 'diskpart'
First look at the contents of your drives by typing list disk, you can then list partitions by doing list partition or you can check volumes by typing list volume ; to get greater detail about your disk's partitions you should first select it. (If you have just one hdd, and it is listed as disk 0 when you do 'list disk' the command would be select disk 0) Now you can do detail disk to get details about the partitions on that disk.

Again, I don't know if your compaq uses the BIOS on Hard drive, but you can find out the partitions that exists using that method; to see where your bios resides and other such details you will have to go to the compaq website and look up your model number.

HTH

[Spunk]

Therein lies the problem. I can't get to the BIOS so I can change the boot sequence, although I think it is going through the CD-ROM. I'll try making the boot disks. I'll let you know how that works. It will be a couple of days as I'm busy for a bit. Statica, thanks again for the help on this.

MJS