Kiel_M
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Formatting the Hard Drive
I presently have Windows XP Professional, but our computer has been being attacked by Trojan Horses and Viruses for the past few years and i am finally going to do something about it. I want to erase everything. But when i go to either Format by right clicking on the C Drive or by typing Format C: in the Command Prompt; it says that i should quit any disk utilities or other programs that are using this drive and make sure that no window is displaying the contents of the drive. Please, I know this may sound like a stupid question but i can't seem to find out what processes are running in the background.
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you neeed to create a boot floppy or cdrom that would allow you to boot without using xp installed on your machine. then with that you can delete/format partitions and reinstall windows again.
best if you have original xp cd..its bootable and would make the job easier for you.
else you can get some bootdisks at www.bootdisk.com
best if you have original xp cd..its bootable and would make the job easier for you.
else you can get some bootdisks at www.bootdisk.com
You can't format while in windows. Take a look at http://home.pacbell.net/dbk4297/fdiskformat.html for information about format and fdisk. If you plan to fdisk the drive to change partition sizes and your XP install uses NTFS as a file system, you will need to use fdisk to "remove non-DOS partitions" first.
Darrell,
http://home.pacbell.net/dbk4297