I want to reformat my Western Digital Caviar 750. It has Vista installed on it. Microsoft says you can’t uninstall, you can’t delete vista and you cannot reformat the hard drive. My goal is to have a clean WD 750 without an OS in the back ground. There has to be a way to get Vista off this hard drive.

where did you hear that???

I have had zero problems removing vista from hard drives.. I many times remove vista from the boot partition, and leave the restore partition intact in case our customer decides to load vista later (just do the full system recovery).
we then take XP and install it where vista used to live.

if your in doubt, go to WD's site, get the diags for the drive, and write 0's every sector.. instant clean drive (well, it takes time to do every sector, but you will have a drive just as fresh as when it came out of the static bag)

This isn't some twisted joke, right?

Make yourself a boot disk or download a boot cd image. Burn it, boot it, kill vista.

Boot to floppy

format c:



Problem solved

I was trying to reformat the drive because vista kept crashing, memory problems, GUI error, it was endless. So I read the forums and decided to start from scratch. Pull out 3 of the 4 dimms, move the X-FI to a different slot, load drivers. I have two hard drives. I asked vista to reformat the c drive (contains vista) and it started to erase itself then it stopped the program and I went to MS support. I have an XP disc, so i will go that route. Seems to be the consensus.

Backup Vista to an image using Acronis TrueImage in case you need something from it. Put the image on an external hard drive or however you choose.

Umm you can't remove it from the active OS. As a side note it sounds like a hardware problem. Removing vista isn't going to help you. Try running with one RAM stick at a time with no add-on card. If it's stable keep adding parts until the problem reappears. Vista is extremely stable.

i got one word for that BS story LOL


FDISK