reformatting

[Logik]

i know this is probably a really simple question for most of you, but i was wondering exactly how i reformat my hard drive on windows xp professional. i thought it was as simple as popping the windows xp cd into the cd-rom drive right before you restart the computer, (much like the 98 boot disks i used previously) but evidentally not. i have a partitioned hard drive (c & d drives) and i only wish to reformat c since its the one that the OS is installed on. if anyone could help me i would greatly appreciate it, thanks in advance :D

[jawaligt]

I think you should be able to use a standard bootdisk, since even Windows XP can't override your pc's boot setting (eg. it will ALWAYS look for a boot disk first - unless you change it in your BIOS of course -).

[wallie_x]

I had the same problem. I had my hard drive partitioned with Win Me on the 'D' drive and XP on the 'C' drive. I booted to DOS and gave the 'format C:' command because I wanted to try clean installing Win XP. The **** thing wiped out the 'D' drive instead. I think XP must have some type of protection encryption or something. I also switched the XP part of the drive to a NTFS which is not DOS based. Maybe you cannot re-format a drive using DOS that is NTFS? I'd like some answers myself, anyone?