Best way to reformat

[doubledragon5]

I have to reinstll a version of xp on my C drive, but I also have the same OS runing on E drive.. Now I know from doing this some time ago on another pc, that if I delete the C drive and reinstall windows, windows will call my C drive something else.. What is the best way to do this so C stay as C and not end up being called maybe F. Repair install never seems to work well so I always end up doing a complete reinstall instead thanks...

[rjfvillarosa]

How many physical harddrives have you got in that machine and where is the C drive?

[doubledragon5]

I have two raptor drives the C drive is on sata 1

[clroberts]

Cant you just unplug the E: Drive, Reinstall the OS on the C: Drive and plug the E: drive back in and let the OS pick the drive again?

[Cricket]

Why do you have WinXP installed twice on the same computer?

Cricket

[mojo]

WindowsXP is funny with sata drives. I've found the best thing to do is unplug all other drives besides the one you're installing on, then plug them back in after you're done with the install.

[doubledragon5]

Originally Posted by Cricket Why do you have WinXP installed twice on the same computer? Cricket

For this reason cricket.. When one system goes down I have this one as a back up..

[doubledragon5]

Originally Posted by mojo WindowsXP is funny with sata drives. I've found the best thing to do is unplug all other drives besides the one you're installing on, then plug them back in after you're done with the install.

Ok this being a dual boot system, will Xp dual boot or will I have to set that up separately..

[MaximumDMA]

I have noticed that when I tried to install XP on a specific partition and (The SATA C:\ drive) and what I did not notice is that even though I selected the correct partition to format in Windows setup it formatted the IDE ATA100 drive. This is an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum and both the SATA and IDE are onboard and recognized, but if the IDE drive exists, it always tries to utilize that. Same when I upgraded to RC2 of Vista. I had to unplug physically the IDE drive because after the reboot to continue installing it just hung there on "Upgrading Windows" forever. Once I unplugged the drive and had SATA only it would point correctly. Weird issue, but in the simplest terms, unplug the drive that is not the C:\ drive.

[Paintbait]

Seems like a superfluous back-up to me, then again that's just me. I figure isolating the drive from the others and then booting with an XP disc and using it to reformat C:\ specifically. And, okay, I get the back-up, even if it may just be a redundant back-up of WinXP, but I don't understand why you'd need to dual-boot it.

Oh well, just thinking out loud, hope I helped in some way.

[MaximumDMA]

Some people just like to. If everything we ever did had to make sense to others then we would be without the PC alltogether. It made no sense to HP why anyone would ever need a home computer!