want to "del c:" with windows xp

[Razzel]

i've had a lot of trouble with my Sony Vaio PCG-FX705 laptop running WinXP Professional. I have partitioned the harddrive and put all of my important documents on other drives, now i want to completely erase the C drive so i can have a clean install. Using the WinXP professional CD I tried telling it to do a fresh install but it only deletes the Win system files and not all of the files in the Program File folder etc.

What I would ideally like to do is boot my computer up with a boot disk , enter DOS then type del c:. I tried using system recovery console formatting c:, it says that it has formatted the c drive but it doesn't delete all the files on the C drive. When I try del c: i get an Access Denied message. I tried making a boot disk with WinXP but it doens't work, says its a Windows Millenium boot disk. I also made the 6 Boot disk series for XP Professional but I got an error message on the last disk which frooze my comptuer. Even if the disks work, i suspect they would have just taken me back to the system recovery tool...

Any Ideas?

[ktkendall]

Hi Razzel:
Don't know if you have access now or not. but the major HD manufacturers have utilities on their websites that can help you. One is called zero fill which you would download and put on a boot floppy, and it just fills the entire HD with 0's, after which it will need partitioned and formatted to reload an OS.

[edge345]

If the c: drive is a fat 32 format then
boot using a win-98 boot disk then at the a:/
promt use the comand format c:

Then you can boot the win-xp cd from the cd-rom if you have the bios set to boot from cd first....

[Razzel]

The problem is that for both the suggested solutions I need a boot floppy, (btw. my computer is ntfs). The boot floppy i downloaded from the microsoft website (6 disk version) frooze my computer and the boot floppy I made using the options under format A: on my XP machine would boot my machine but wouldn't let me execute any commands. It said it was a windows millenium boot disk.

[Statica]

Simply boot using your WinXP CD and start a regular setup of XP. During the partition selection; select each partition then press D to delete and L to confirm (follow the prompts on screen - I apologize if the letters are wrong); when you have deleted all the logical drives on your HDD that you want deleted, you should see it replaced with the same size of "unpartitioned space". Then to install XP to the aforementioned space, simply select the particular unpartitioned space and create a partition .. and install to it.

[Razzel]

i have 4 drives, c: for programs, d:, e: and f: for all my documents and saves. I don't want to delete the partitions because I want to save all the information on the other drives. Can I just delete the C: partition without deleting the others?

[Statica]

Yes you can do it by the above method, delete off the specific partition (in your case the system partition) .. then create a similar one in the same unpartitioned space. and install to that drive.

needless to say, keep a backup of your data

[Lance1]

Check your Hotmail Razzel! I sent you a file that should do the job for you.

Lance1.

[Statica]

NB: a lot of zero fill utilities zero-fill a drive not a partition specifically. So pls read the documentation before proceeding.

[edge345]

How to make DOS boot disk to access NTFS partitions....

Go to www.ntfs.com

[Tuf]

Like Statica said all you need is your XP disc. You can do it all from there.