carrspaints

Hi everyone. I'm desperate for some help. I have a hardrive that has become so badly corrupted with viruses that I want to reformat and re-install. No problem there.

However, to avoid future headaches with having to re-install Windows XP plus all the other software again, I'd like to clone my new installation to DVD. Questions are:

1. How do I reformat a hardrive with windows XP, but still allow the computer to boot to the "C" drive after everything has been deleted?
2. Is there any hardrive cloning software that will enable me to backup my entire hardrive to DVD and then use these DVDs to boot to a the reformatted drive?
3. Problem is that if I format the hardrive, I get a message "missing NTLDR" when I boot up. So if the computer cannot see the harddrive, how can my back ups be installed to a drive that doesn't exist?

Not well explained, I know. All I'm trying to do is clone a hardrive to DVDs, then us those DVDs as bootable media that will enable me to reinstall the cloned hardrives. Any help would be very, very welcome.

TheChef

1. The computer should boot to the C drive if there's no media in the drives.

2. Not sure. Probably.

3. The computer still recognizes the HD. If you reformat a HD and you boot the computer without bootable media, it will just say "No Operating System", or, in your case, "missing NTLDR". The CD has to be bootable, I don't believe burning a copy of the files in Windows makes it bootable...

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tracer

You should not have any problems unless you change your boot setup in your bios to boot from the floppy, harddrive, cdrom, etc.

P.S. make sure you make a backup of your files and system before you format.
any files that you wish to keep copy to a disk.

backseatgunner

To reformat your harddrive with xp just insert your xp cd and make sure in your boot order in bios, the cd-rom is set higher than your hard drive. When you boot up it's pretty self explanitory. There is an option that will ask you if you want to format. Just make sure when asked, you choose NTFS instead of FAT32.

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ilovefishsticks

nero has a thing that lets u burn boot cds and lets u create a backup of what files you want and then once all is done u use nero to uncompress them.
if you install using the win xp cd you can choose to have windows format it in ntfs automaticly, its easier
also just keep in mind if u have multiple viruses then they mite be in the files u want to burn.

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