Formatting a Partition?

[aprisa]

My home PC has slowed down almost to a stop from the addition of too many Naf kids programs from my daughter! Decided to wipe clean and start again.

It has 2 80 gig partitions so I have loaded XP on the D partition and migrated all the files I want to keep to that.

Question is - How best to wipe the C drive? I used to use Fdisk but it does no recognise that command, things have obviously moved on!

What's the quickest and easiest way to get rid of all the crap and re-load and is it best to then put XP back on the C drive and reverse the migration therefore making it easier to load future stuff which will default to C ?

Nick

[scorp]

If you already have windows installed on your machine then you can start in 'command prompt' mode and use the 'format' command to format the drive. Alternatively you could create a MSDOS boot floppy or CDROM which has the Format utility on it.

[Hamster]

The way I'd do it is to copy all the stuff, files, that you want to keep back to C:, then clear out D: with a format using NTFS as the file system. Then copy all the stuff to keep back to the newly cleaned out D: You can then use this as a permanent partition for your data files.

Then, boot from your Windows XP disc and when prompted delete the old C: partition and re-install Windows on C: again using NTFS, Windows likes to be on C: anyway. Make sure you delete the correct partition in XP set-up. If you want belt and braces, write the files you want to keep to a CD or CD-RW if you have a CD writer.

This way, with the data files on D:, you can clear out and re-install Windows on C: willy nilly.

HTH

H

[koenig999]

Like Hamster says, windows likes to be on C:.

I put one on a D: partition once and I kept having little propblems and issues with programs not finding shortcuts etc.

With XP you can use Control Panel - Computer Management - Disk Management to format and delete partitions etc.

Koenig