Reformatting Hard Drive

[ajbrun]

I'm going to reformat my parents hard drive, but when I looked on th internet to find exactly what to do, I realised that they only give instructions for reinstalling the same operating system as there was previously . I would like to get rid of everything on the hard disk, but instead of re-installing windows 98, I'd like XP in . The guides talk about needing a boot disk, but would this be a boot disk from an XP machine or 98?

Could anone either point me in the right direction, so that I can find the neccessary guide, or give detailed instructions on what I need to do here.

Thanks

[SilentDeath]

Goto bios, set CD drive as primary boot drive with hdd secondry, stick the windows XP cd in and you can do it all from there. The XP disk is bootable so you dont need any floppys...

[ajbrun]

Don't need a boot disk thing?

[Clstrphbc_donut]

nope, as the man above says, you can format from the XP CD mate. Then it will go on to install XP.

[EvilMunky]

instead of formatting your disks, run an fdisk, remove all partitiions and then create the partictions as part of xp install. It seems to like it better that way.

[ajbrun]

I don't know how to do that.

[EvilMunky]

hmm if you dont know how to do if, probably just best booting from xp cd and instlaling that way - then when it talks about partitions, create new one there
make sure you choose ntfs

[ajbrun]

* why are partitions good, and what are they?
* What's ntfs?

[EvilMunky]

partitions are necessary
a partition is a piece of your disk that is prepared for your operating system. You can either have one partition on a disk, or several - for you, best to have one.

NTFS = NT File System - its basically a robust and secure file system for your computer and os. Means you have better control over the security of the files as well as more dependable data