Please Help An Idiot.

[Skwerl_X]

Okay, I'm an idiot. I opened an e-mail from MS yesterday saying it had the latest security patch for IE. Being that I'm an idiot, I opened the attachment. My Norton AV started going crazy then locked up. Now, panicking like the idiot I am, I shut down my computer. Upon rebooting, I was unable to open any of my programs. All my exe.s are saying they don't exist.

Okay, its time for this idiot to reformat, lick my wounds and start over.

Well....

It won't let me reformat. I tried first reformatting by right clicking on the C drive icon in My Computer and selecting reformat. It says it is unable to reformat either in quick or standard mode. So I try booting to the command prompt and try some old DOS tomfoolery yadda yadda reformat. Knowing it's dealing with an idiot, my computer asks me, "Are you sure you want to do this, idiot?"

Of course, I hit the Y key and pressed enter.

Being an idiot, I was expecting the reformat to commence, but of course it tells me it is unable to reformat because I am no longer the master of this hard drive and I am in fact, an idiot!

So, barring tossing my computer into the dumpster, whats my next move?

Windows XP SP1
AMD Athlon 3000
1024Gb RAM

Thanks very much,
The Idiot.

 

[grassapa]

Ok man, think about it, how could you format your HD if you are using it, yes you are using it to run windows or msdos. Its like trying to erase a document that is currently open in word. look man, if you want to reformat your HD, do one of the following things:
- Make sure your floppy drive is in the first boot order, or at least before the hd boot sequence(you do this in the bios). . slap in your boot diskette that will automatically take you to the command promt, the boot diskette is necesary. then run fdisk from there. (i hope you know how to use fdisk) OR
- Make sure your cd drive is in the first boot order, or at least before the hd boot sequence(you do this in the bios). slap in the windows xp instalation disk and go through installation again, when it asks you in which partition to install windows, delete the current partition you got and create a new one.

its not too hard. just common sense.

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My computer is so fast it proves the theory of relativity wrong...

 

[goloap]

Create a DOS boot disk, copy the utility format.com on it. Then boot your computer from the floppy and you then should be able to reformat every thing. If this fails, try with fdisk.

P.S. for the format.com don't forget to specify the drive you want to format, i.e. format c:.

In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies

 

[grassapa]

P.S. for the format.com don't forget to specify the drive you want to format, i.e. format c:.

you cant do that unless you are running ms dos on another hard drive or partition. as far as i can understand, he tried that already and it didnt work, and therefore i implied he only had one hard drive in one partition.

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My computer is so fast it proves the theory of relativity wrong...

 

[sturm]

get a windows me boot disk. boot off the disk and run fdisk. It will detect the ntfs partition if u used ntfs and you can delete that and remake the partition, make active, reformat and then reinstall xp using ntfs if you wish.
I know this works. ive done it before.

you can get the boot files from <A HREF="http://www.bootdisk.com" target="_new">http://www.bootdisk.com</A>

 

[4Ryan6]

Excellent and to the point sturm! Way to go!



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