Help reformat drive

Newbie Forum
#1

okay so i went into BIOS, boot sequence, and designated it to boot off the WINXPHome installation CD. so, i select “install fresh copy of windows”…when that comes up it tells me:

partition1: FAT
partition2: NTFS (or NFTS, i forget which it is)
partition3: FAT32

if i’m to delete all of each of these 3 partitions, do the above designations matter, OR…now that i’ll just have 2 partitions (one with 25GB of space allotted for WinXP, and the other unallocated), will i have to designate anything w/ the above types of filing systems…and if so, which one to which one? **ALSO, how do i appropriate 25GB of the one partition for WinXP? will it just ask me how much space i wanna set aside for this first partition? what do i name the partition (if applicable) ?? it’s ONE hard drive 80 GB

#2

your post is [U]very [/U]confusing to me.

but ill try to help, if you have many partitions on a drive, each one could have information you want, so make sure you back up EVERYTHING you need/want on your drive.

from their, im not sure what your wanting to do, do you have 3 different partitions on your drive? what are you wanting to do with them?

other than that all i can tell you is this

fat is for really old drives with small GB…you prob don’t want this one.

NTFS is what windows xp uses, this would be my first choice

if you have partitions that are unallocated, it sounds like you have disc space you could be using.

im not sure the best/easiest way to do it, but partition magic is what I usually use when dealing with partitions, the problem is its really easy to loose everything on your hard drive when messing with them.

#3

cool thank you. all i really wanna do is get a clean wipe/clean bill of health and reformat. computer in question (not this one i’m on now) is so badly malware-iinfected that it says its missing certain exectuable files that let me even access the control panel…add to that, i can’t even get online to dL anti-malware software…so i’m trying to figure out if i can take software dL’d from this computer i’m on, and xfer/save that software onto a CD that will (hopefully) execute correctly in problem computer in question (do u know a way?..but what i’d really like to do is just reformat.

#4

well if all you wanna do is just format all your partitions, aka everything on your hard drive then thats very easy.

first off i assume you only have one hard drive currect?

if that is the case pop your windows xp cd in and reboot. When you get to the menu format all your partitions.

then you should be able to merge all your partitions together and reinstall

#5

Malware wins , hate to loose

#6

yep can do a few things before reformat and fdisk

#7

In principle you can do it with your installation disk but I would prefer to get a clean disk before startting the new installation.
If you have a suspect disk the better you can do is to use an utility thta doesn’t belong to the windows family like Gparted.
Gparted is Linux based but you can download a Live CD image, burn it to a disc, insert the disc in your drive and start your computer.
It will boot from the Gparted disk and you will be able to get a clean HDD at no cost because Gparted is freeware.
If your computer is not secure download and burn the CD using another machine.