Formatting NFTS (1 Viewer)

[Bryan X]

The hard drives on my last few computers have always been FAT32. So when I've occasionally wanted to reformat the hard drive to do a clean install of Windows, I've used a Win98 boot diskette to get to DOS with CD drivers and formatted from there. Then installed Windows.

My new Dell computer's hard drive is using the NTFS file system. I created a Win98 Bootable CD but when I get to the command prompt I can't see my hard drive because DOS doesn't recognize NTFS.

My question is, how would I go about formatting the hard drive and doing a clean install of Windows if I can't boot to DOS?

 

[Greg.K]

You will hopefully have a bootable Windows XP CD that will give you the option to format the drive.

 

[Bryan X]

Yes, I do have a bootable Windows XP CD. It's one I bought back when XP came out. I didn't realize I could do the format from there. Unfortunately I ran into a little problem.

My problem was that when booting from this XP CD, it would eventually give me the 'Blue Screen of Death' right before it launched the install. Some research I did seems to indicate this is a problem when you have XP SP2 installed and are trying to boot from an XP SP1 CD.

Anyway, I thought then I could just boot to Windows, insert the XP CD and do an install from there. The disc came up fine with the option to Reinstall Windows, but when I clicked that option it told me I couldn't because the current version of XP I am running is newer than the one on the CD!

Soooooo......

I decided to create a bootable Windows XP CD slipstreamed with SP2. So I downloaded the 266MB SP2 file from Microsoft, copied my XP CD to my hard drive and slipstreamed the two. I used ISOBuster to extract a innaccessable file off the CD and then used Roxio to create the new Windows XP SP2 bootable install CD.

Then I crossed my fingers and booted from the CD... It actually worked!