Reformat

[PartyChief]

Ok, im doing an economy build and salvaged a 80G WD IED, but it has a bunch of personal info on it that i dont want. I would like to use it as the boot drive for the new machine. How do i go about erasing the disk clean and installing a fresh copy of XP on it? Can i slave it on to another system and delete all files? Will booting from OS CD give me an option to reformat? How long will that take?

 

[MisfitSELF]

I've only ever "started from scratch" with Win98 and earlier operating systems, but can't you create a boot disk in XP the includes Fdisk & format?

Then you just boot the start disk (assuming you have a floppy drive :roll: ), fdisk the drive, delete the old partition, create a new partition, reboot, then "format c: /s". After the format is complete you could just run the setup on the XP CD or boot that CD.

XP seems to be better at including a lot of the basic system building utilities within rather than having to use DOS boot disk. So I highly suspect that someone on this forum will direct you to use some utility right off the CD.

I'm curious to find out if this is possible, as well, as I'll be building an XP machine from scratch here in the next couple of weeks.

 

[KingLoftusXII]

When you go to install the new OS it will give you partition/reformat options.
Do a NTFS reformat (not quick). 80 gb should take about 5 or so min.