Need help with reformat hardrive

Eighty8lx50

New Member
I bought a new 300 gb hard drive, it got a virus, and I am trying to reformat it. I have tried changing the boot sequence to cd rom #1, then putting windows disk in with no luck, it just tries to boot up the virus windows setup. Basically, I need your instructions to reformat. Any comments would be a appreciated. Thank you! :o
 
By now, you understand what a Reformat Does?

WIPES ABSOLUTLY EVERYTHING

Back Up what you want.

Ok Here Goes.

Turn Your computer off.

Turn it back on

Do you know how too get too your BIO's?

If not, Tap Delete Constantly from when you turn your computer on too until it gets too bios (Some may differ, look for "** for Setup")

Go too Boot Sequence

Change Boot Order from hdd to Cd

2nd Boot = none

3rd boot = none

4th boot = none

etc . . .

Then It will reboot your computer

Watch closely

It will say

"press any key too boot from disk"

(now this is the part that you look for the "any" Key)

Push a key.

Do you know what to do too reformat?

If not.

Let windows load up all required files

At the Welcome to Setup page, press ENTER.

Press F8 to accept the Windows XP Licensing Agreement.

If an existing Windows XP installation is detected, you are prompted to repair it. To bypass the repair, press ESC. (This may not Happen)

All the existing partitions and the unpartitioned spaces are listed for each hard disk.

Use the Arrow Keys too select your current Windows Install.

Press D to delete The Windows Partition, press L

Press C on the Now "unpartitioned Space" to create a new partition

Press Enter on the Newly Created Partitioned Space After you have defined how big you want that partition

Format the partition by using the NTFS file system (Quick)

The Rest is Easy.

Good Luck

Ps. Appreciate this, My Fingers hurt like Hell.
 
Thanks, BUt I allready tryed that, And it just boots up normaly. How can I format the drive another way? From DOS? Sorry my GF wrote the first post!
 
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you let your Girl friend use your computer, no wonder you need to format ;)

If you set the primary boot device to CD and all the rest to none windows will not be able to boot to anything but the windows CD.
This sound to me like you are not hitting the " any key " to boot to the CD in time or your CD is not bootable.
Are you using the Dell OS cd that came with your computer ?

The only way to format the drive is to boot to another disk other then the HDD and use the format and fdisk commands.

there are a few free utilitys to make boot disks but i cant think of the name of the one i use ATM :)
 
Ok, I had a usb keyboard that does not work untill the pc boots all the way up, So I used a old school non usb keyboard and then I was able to boot from the cd. Thanks for all the help!
 
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