Need computer help

[Lord Gue]

Im running Windows XP and I want to format my hard drive, wipe the slate clean if you will, but I have no clue how to do this, could someone help me out?

[Oriadin]

First question - Do you have a Win XP CD?
Second - Do you know how to boot from a CD?

[Arlenia Tavira]

Go into your BIOS and set your CD-ROM drive as a boot device. Run XP setup, and on the drive info page, tell it to format your drive (quick or full, doesn't matter IMO, and it's your choice to do NTFS or FAT32), now continue the setup.

Done.

[Lord Gue]

OR:
1. yes
2. no
AR:
How do you access BIOS? IVe booted to DOS and it wont let me do anything Fdisk or regardless, and wouldnt I need to format first before reinstaling?

[Mu Satach]

oooo....

1 - make sure there is *nothing* on your hard drive that you want to keep. (obvious I know, but I'm just typing in my list of stuff as I do this often at work.)

2 - make sure you have ALL THE DRIVERS for EVERY DAMN THING on your PC. (otherwise you might be in for a ride through hell getting things to work.)

3 - When you start your computer up, watch the screen carefully and there will be a moment when it's all black and at the bottom it will say "Press F2 to enter setup" - Press F2, this will give you access to the BIOS.

4 - Look for a boot up option and toggle through the settings until the boot up order is Floppy, CD-Rom, Hard Disk. Another option is that you make a boot disk. If you have the XP documentation it should tell you how to make one.

5 - Place the Win Disk in your hard drive and reboot computer.

5 - Follow instructions on setting up Win.

My advice, delete the partition, create and formate a new partition with a full install and choose NTFS as it's more stable than FAT32. (However I'm not sure if OLD games will run under the NTFS... but that's your choice.)

Follow the onscreen instructions, Sit... wait... watch the pretty colors on the screen.

[Lord Gue]

Actually Mu, it never gives me the option to access BIOS in startup. And I tried to do the whole partition thing, least I started to when I tried Fdisk, but that didnt work. When I got in dos it told we Fdisk was a bad file name.

[Mu Satach]

What type of computer are you useing? There's *always* a way to access the BIOS... some companies just don't make it obvious.

Like Toshiba and their laptops.

The other option would be to create a boot disk.

[Mu Satach]

Oh, and BIOS is the SETUP, usually it has features to set the time and date, boot sequence, hard disks, etc.

If you see the Press F2 command and you press it and it brings up the setup menu and options, your in the BIOS.

BIOS is just the term for the chip.

And you shouldn't even have to mess with DOS at all.

(add) - as once you've booted off the CD or a boot disk and Winis setting up it gives you the options to delete the partition and to create and formate a new partition.

[Lord Gue]

Im on a gateway running XP

It goes straight from startup to windows, theres at no time an option to go to BIOS, least not from start up. Im still trying a boot disk, but for some odd reason I have no FDisk.exe....

[Mu Satach]

Forget the FDisk.exe... let it gooooo.... you're livin in the past...

hang on and let me check on something.

[Lord Gue]

lol, i got it from someone else who was tellin me how to do it

[Mu Satach]

http://service.gateway.com/gateway/

there's a little video about flashing the bios, (*upgrading the bios*)


But, you only need to gain access to the BIOS if you need to make your computer boot from the CD rom.

run around on both of these sites to get more info that is specific to your operating system and computer.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;en-us;winxp


http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;winxpstart


http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http%3a%2f%2fsupport.microsoft.c om/common/canned.aspx%3fR%3dd%26H%3dWindows%2bXP%2bKB%2bArti cles%2bAbout%2bInstallation%26LL%3dwinxpnetkb%26Sz %3dkbsetup

Got to run... HAVE FUN!!! :D

[Lord Gue]

lol, thanks for your help but it turns out if you boot XP off the Install disk you can delete the partition from there, and then your already in install so it works out

again, thankies so much for the help

[Mu Satach]

yep... that's what I was saying...

Windows walks you through all of that so you don't need the Fdisk.exe anymore. :)

and if you can get the install stuff to run, then there's no need to mess with the BIOS. :D

But the REAL fun starts when you're through installing the OS and then you move on to the video, sound, modem, etc.
MURHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

>=}

Though, I've heard the driver base that comes with XP is pretty good. But I only play with NT and W2k these days... though that will probably change some day... all the programmers in the basement have moved to XP... course... we'll need to upgrade all our machines up here before we move off of NT. Pent. II - 266 just isn't enough juice.

[Lord Gue]

well, since ive only had 2 comps before this, one ran dos off a floppy disk, the other could barely handle Windows 95. So all this easy stuff is new on me, lol

[Mu Satach]

:lol

Welcome to the future. :D ;)