XP can't be killed!

[AlwaysUp]

Crapola....Here I am after having reformatted my C:\ drive and I reinstalled Windows 98SE and thought I'd be rid of XP! But nooooo.... I have had hell getting drivers/software installed on almost every piece of equipment I have. A tech support guy for my HP scanner said something about debug.exe having to be run to remove any remnants of the stuff that XP puts on a drive for recovery purposes. Does anybody have any suggestions. Will the utility that writes all zero's to a drive fix this?

[bailey]

I hade no problem doing that at all, did a format and installed 98se about 6 months ago,
at that time I was makeing a lot of hardware changes , slowley upgradeing this thing and got tired of calling ms to activate, I just formated it off and put 98se back on, now I have two 40 gig drives, one has 98se and the other has w2000pro, thinking of dumping 2000 and put xp back on, done upgradeing for a while now.

[minutrice]

why don't you use fdisk to delete the partition and make another one. I always fdisk then format.

Also, if you buy a legitimate copy of XP and you have to keep calling ms to reactivate, why not just get a pirated copy so you don't have to keep reactivating. After all, you have bought a copy and if it isn't installed on another computer I don't see anything wrong with it.

Josh

[glc]

Josh - that's an inappropriate comment in these forums. Please don't do it again, we frown heavily on piracy discussions here. I suggest you read the forum FAQ (button above labeled f.a.q)

[minutrice]

I didn't say for him to illegally use a copy of xp. If he has paid for a copy of xp and he gets a pirated copy(to keep him from having to reactivate) that is the same exact version and he only installs the pirated copy once and does not installed the the real cd that means he is not illegally using a copy of xp. Only a different cd.

Josh

[glc]

Josh: This issue is not open for discussion. You have been warned.

[minutrice]

sorry... warning taken


Josh

[AlwaysUp]

I did not delete the partition before format, so I guess that might be a solution. A question about the MBR that I have is this. If when reformatting a drive, does the MBR get reformatted also and you create a completely new MBR , also, do you have to use a particular switch like format c: /? Also, does anybody know about the Debug.exe proggie found on boot disks?

[morriswindgate]

I would go ahead an do the FDISK routine and Format. When you installed XP you may have setup the Hard Drive with the NTFS file system and not the FAT32 that Windows 98/ME uses.

[AlwaysUp]

Actually Morriswingate, I think I will fdisk and then format this time, but no; it wasn't that I had formatted with NTFS for XP. I had two separate 15Gb Hdds that the original C:\ drive had Win98 se on it and then I formatted a disk D:\ fat32 and put XP home edition on it. But I have been made aware that even in this scenario that XP holds separate a portion of diskspace on the active partition (C:\) to write recovery files. Aparently a simple format does not entirely wipe a disk as the warning just before a format says that it will. Thanks for the replys and I will post my luck or....lack thereof, back here.

[framerw47]

FWIW, I installed W2K as a dual boot with SE and couldn't get my modem to work, so I decided to uninstall it till I could get another modem. I used PM6 to make the partition for W2k. When I formatted and FDISKED I still had remnants of the new partition for some reason. I ended up getting the zero-write utility from Samsung to write zeros to the hard drive and reformatted. This brought everything back to a pristine condition where I was able to reinstall SE and everything was good with the world again.

[AlwaysUp]

I don't have PM6, framerw47; but I ended up getting good results when I used fdisk to DELETE each partition on C:\ and D:\ drives and then fdisk to repartition. Formatted and installed Win98SE and I just last night finished with getting all my hardware driver/software installed and all the app software. My registry is clean and pristine without any ghost entries from multiple attempts at install or anything! Now all I got to do is BACKUP that REGISTRY !!!!

[framerw47]

I think maybe it was because I used PM to make my D: partition that I couldn't get rid of it without the zero-write utility. If I had used FDISK to begin with, I could have done the same thing you did I suspect. The reason I used PM was because I didn't want to screw up SE since it was working so well at the time. Thank goodness for CD burners and RW discs!!!!! I was able to restore a backup of my C: drive and everything was good again after cleaning it up.