I’m not very good at this and “wipe/reinstalls” scare me. I found myself with a CMD.exe virus and it was affecting my computer in bad ways. Anti-virus couldn’t fix it so I figured it was time for a reinstall. I backed everything to my F drive and reached for my Windows XP disc.
I grabbed the Professional Edition MS sent me for a project I did last year… not the home version I had originally used.
Because I’m dumb I didn’t pay really close attention to what it was doing. It loaded onto the F drive, not the C drive. It left everything intact (thank god). I noticed this on reboot. I opened the case, switched F to Master and C to Slave and then tried to format C (using Windows). It wouldn’t complete the format… it says it can’t.
Now when I reboot it asks me which Windows XP (pro or home) to load. I don’t want a dual boot. Can anyone tell me how to nuke Windows off my Drive C for good? Do I need to use a boot disk and do a DOS wipe? I thought with XP, DOS was over with?
EDIT to ADD:
No partitions. C and F are seperate hard drives who love together in sin.
What I’m asking, basically, is how do I wipe C: completely. I’ll leave F and XP Pro as my boot hard drive and use C as the backup. Should I do it with a boot 3.5 disc then? I’d heard with Windows XP you could format without a 3.5" disc and DOS
You can probably use fdisk to delete the partition, then create a new partition. This should wipe windows off your old C:\ drive, and make it ready for a nice, fresh reinstall.
If you run into issues with the master boot record trying to dual boot, fdisk /mbr cleans the master boot record. Do this ONLY if you’re sure you want to nuke the mbr, though!
If you need a bootdisk, you can get one (easily) from www.bootdisk.com.
Andrew, the problem is the C drive has all the boot files on it. This is why you can’t format it in Windows. When you do manage to dust the C: drive, you will no longer be able to boot to the F: drive.
Here is what you must do:
Install Windows on the C drive. Use the CD and pay attention to the options you get. You don’t want to upgrade you want a new install. You will get a chance to format during setup. If you’re worried about a virus, you should take this opportunity to format the drive. Choose NTFS.
Once you install on the C drive, you will just have a single boot system. The files on F will still be there, but you won’t be able to boot to it anymore. At that point, just move your data back to C: then format F: to get rid of all the mess.
Since you’re reinstalling anyway, don’t do anything as Administrator. It’s a lot harder to catch viruses when you don’t have administrative privledges. I’ve got two batch files on my desktop that let me install and whatever when I need too:
