Page 1 of formating old hard drive help please!!!!

Hi
i have got 60 gig hdd in p4 dell 2.0 ghz with 256mb ram. at present my computer is very sloww as i downloaded lots of unnecessary softwares and other programmes. now even i have got rid of most unwanted programmes but my computer is still very slow. I was wondering if i can reformate my hdd from scratch. I have backed up all important photos and documents and i have got windows xp and all other disc which are needed to reinstall. Can any one guide me to get simple instructions to do this. as i am not a very techi person. if any one give me a link to other site etc.
thanks

put either of the disks into your cd or dvd rom, then re-boot..you should be presented
with a menu...follow the instructions from there to reformat.

Ste.

This item was edited on Sunday, 7th March 2004, 19:32

If you aren`t presented with a Windows XP-installation menu, or the text "Press any key to boot from CD" you need to enable booting from CD in the BIOS.

If you don`t know how to enable that, post here and me or someone else can guide you through it :)

Also, you should format the hdd with NTFS file format. That will give you a little additional speed in windows :)

sorry dont have a clue how to enable booting from cd. help will be appreciated.
please if you can guide me step by step
thanks

Did you first check if the CD booted by itself (or showed the text "Press any key to boot from CD")?

If you did and it didn`t boot and have to change the BIOS settings, this is how to do it;

When the PC boots up and shows the very first screen, keep an eye out for text similar to this: "Press <> to enter BIOS". Press that button! It`s usually Delete or one of the Function-keys (F1, F2 etc.).
You will then enter the BIOS-settings instead of starting up Windows.

**This is where very advanced settings for the computer are changed and you should NOT change anything you do not know exactly what it will do.**

As there are many different BIOS`s I can`t tell you exactly how to do this, only the general approach on how to do it.

What you`ll be looking for is something called Boot order or Boot sequence.
Go through the different menus/pages looking for this. The BIOS should give you proper instructions on how to navigate through it.

The boot-list tells the computer in which order to check devices for bootable software (like Operating Systems (Windows) and Installation Discs). What you need is to tell it to check the CD-ROM before checking the harddrive.

There are three main variations of the boot-list, looking along the ways of this (so you know what you are looking for):

Single box variation
Looks like:
[C, D, E]

Change/Cycle through the entry so that the drive-letter assigned to your CD-ROM (usually D) comes before C.

Enable/Disable variation
Looks like:
[CD-ROM/DVD Disabled]
[Primary IDE/HDD Enabled]

Change the CD-ROM entry to Enabled.

Listing variation
Looks like:
[Primary IDE/HDD]
[CD-ROM/DVD]

Change the Primary IDE/HDD entry to CD-ROM/DVD and vice versa.

After you have changed it accordingly you need to find a button called Exit and save settings.
The computer will then restart and if the Windows XP CD is in the drive it should start that instead of regular Windows.

Tell me if there`s anything that needs further explanation or if you get stuck somewhere :)
//Gurra W
_______________________________________
-I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
My DVD Collection
My YMDb Top 20

thanks Gurra w for the advice. It was not much difficult. Once i booted up using windows cd it was all straight forward. Although i did not know how how to boot up from cd. so i started the compuetr and presses few F keys and i still dont know which one worked but once i was there every thing went fine. there were two partitions on my drive. one was FAT and the bigger one was NTFS so I chose NTFS.
I am still sorting some bits and pieces like drivers and evry thing now.
Thanks anoce again for the help

I`m glad it worked out! :)

Are you using two different operating systems on the computer? Like Windows 98 and Windows XP?
I`m guessing no, and if I`m correct you could have deleted the FAT and NTSF partitions within the installer and created a new, single (and larger) partition.

Do you now have two harddrives in Windows Explorer? One called C: and one called D:? How large are C: and D:?

//Gurra W
_______________________________________
-I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
My DVD Collection
My YMDb Top 20

The Fat partition may have been a system restore partition.

Just go into dos and type FORMAT C:

Regards,
:p:p:p D-I-C-A-N-I-O :p:p:p

FAT partition was only 32 mb so i am not losing much. although as you said i should have 2 drives C and D but my D drive is dvd writer so i dont know wether FAT partition is for system restore or any thing else.