Windows XP help

[joshbuys]

I recently had some trouble with my GATEWAY GT2558, It came originally installed with WINDOWS XP MEDIA CENTER EDITION 2005, and I got a free upgrade to WINDOWS VISTA. I upgraded to vista not long after I got it which proved to be a mistake, started giving me troubles a few months later, but I got those sorted out and have been using it with vista installed for a couple years. This last week it started running real slow and such. I decided to format it and put xp back on it.....for some reason it wouldn't format the drive - kept giving me and error to the effect that 'can't format partition'. The cd is the gateway recovery cd that came with the machine - which I just used to fix my brothers pc about a month ago - so i downloaded FDISK to format the drive - it worked, but I'm pretty sure it is the wrong format as it only gave the option to format to FAT32 and I know windows runs best on NTFS. It's been 'copying files' for the past 8 hours and is still at '0%'. WHAT CAN I DO TO FIX THIS?!?!

Please help me????

 

[CrayonMuncher]

You should be able to choose how to format the drive before you install and should have the option to format into ntfs, win xp will work on fat32 and it shouldnt be staying 0% for that long is the disk ok when it says it is coping files is stuck on one file or is it copy but slowly, it should say at the bottom of the screen what file it is copying?

if it doesnt let you format try using gparted:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

free open source formating software works quite qell

 

[joshbuys]

It stayed in the same place for 13 hours, so I tried the gparted program - was able to format to ntfs, It's now been 6 hours 11 minutes and it's still sitting at 'copying files... please wait' and at 0% it does not specify what file is being copied. I think the disc itself may be the problem, one of my co-workers is bringing me his disc tomorrow, so we will see what that yields.