Reformatting

L

Leon

New Member
Hey guys. I interrupted an install of windows xp pro on my system cos the disk was dodgy. I want to wipe what's on there and sart again, but the problem is, my computer has the boot record installed, and it tries to boot up windows, then fails with a 'NTLDR is missing' error.

I need to find a way of formatting my drive and starting again, but I can't get into cmd or anything. Is there some way of making a floppy disk that will allow me to format my C drive? Though I'm not even sure if the drive is named C anymore!?

Thanks,

Leon.
 
If you can get into your bios, you can switch the boot seqence(spelling?) to boot cd first. That way itll read your cd before it tries to boot up windows, so you should be able to reinstall it.
 
That is usually the case but unfortunately my computer thinks xp is already installed, because it accesses the boot record, rather than going to setup. I just get an error :-(

I've downloaded a boot disk now, but when I try and format C, it says the drive specification is invalid. I've tried every letter in the alphabet out of desperation but no luck. I'm wondering if my hard drive no longer has a letter?

EDIT: Ok, I managed to access set up on my win xp disk to see if I could sort something through that. now I get:

'An internal setup error has occurred. Could not find place for a swap file. Setup can not continue.'

RAAAAAAH!!!!!!!! Something tells me this 'can't find place for swap file' business means my hard drive is un-named?
 
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If you were using a W98 boot floppy, it won't detect NTFS partitions. I'd go into FDISK using the W98 floppy, delete and recreate the partition. You should then be able to format using the WinXP CD.
 
You have to type format C: not format C with a boot floppy, but instead type fdisk and just delete the paratition take out floppy reboot to the XP CD and make the new partition and format from the xp cd
 
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I need to find a way of formatting my drive and starting again, but I can't get into cmd or anything. Is there some way of making a floppy disk that will allow me to format my C drive? Though I'm not even sure if the drive is named C anymore!?
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Well the next time you install, you can format it (but to answer your question, yes a simple boot disk wil allow you to format ... if you formatted to NTFS, you'll need a slightly different bootdisk)

That is usually the case but unfortunately my computer thinks xp is already installed, because it accesses the boot record, rather than going to setup. I just get an error :-(
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Then override the bootorder via manual or BIOS :)
 
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