I need to wipe the hard drive and install windows XP Pro again, but when I try and format the drive, a message appears saying "Windows cannot format. Quit any disk utilities or other programmes that are using this drive, and make sure that no window is displaying the contents of this drive. Then try formatting again" I HAVE TRIED EVERYTHING, and the same message appears???
It was the same question at the Finnish side of afterdawn. Start/Control_panel/Administrative_Tools/Disk_management. There you can set disk active or run the wizard in order to make disk active (partitioning, setting active and formatting the disk) If you try to re-install to clean, it is better do with installation cd of XP and erase drive first and then mount, partition and format during installation of XP.
You can also, during the basic WinXP installation (still in the blue-screen area) just tell XP to format your hd before it installs... Also, you can use the WinXP Repair mode (on your XP disk, option 'R' during setup) and format from there. In repair mode, you can directly format to NTFS, too.
Do any of you guys remember the floppy disc. I have got one from my win98 days for just this purpose. I have copied it so many times I wish I could have sold it.
no listen this is the way to format your hdd using winxp ok wen u start ur comp up pop in the winxp CD and u can either go and do a number of things but the options are available hit on shift F5 this should take you to A: on a command line dos mode then u can put in format C: (or the drive u wish to format) however if this doesn't work then put in FDISK and this will take you to the partition section here you can delete the primary dos partition (make sure u backup up the stuff on ur hdd) by doin this this will allow you comp to not recognise the partition and create a clean partition this will automatically wen installing xp format your HDD or the other easier option is to pop in the CD at comp startup and follow the instruxctions until it displays format using NTFS (quick) format using FAT32 (quick) format using NTFS format using FAT32 these are a few of the methoss i use
I'd really recommend PartitionMagic from PowerQuest for all this sort of stuff. Works in Windows and DOS but you need to have it installed before you run into problems. Format drives/partitions, convert FAT/FAT32 and NTFS drives/ partitions from one to the other and loads of other stuff. It’s a wonderful tool that has got me out of trouble many times.
