[HempyDude]

Ok, so I wanted to do a reinstall of XP. I came here to the forums in the hopes that I would find some advice or tips to help. I did, and the tips worked very well.

Some strange things have been happening to my system that I need help with.

First.....After reinstalling XP, I find that the OEM disk didn't reformat my harddrive, but instead loaded XP over top of the old installation, so now I have 2 XP OS's to choose from when I startup my computer. Fixed that with the restore feature in XP.

Now.........When I start my computer, everything seems to go ok until I get to the blue WELCOME screen. Here I stay. Windows freezes at this point and does not progress any further. In order for me to get into windows, I have to use the Ctrl/Alt/Delete command. Once I do that, it takes a minute, but everything finally falls into place and my system seems to work fine although it seems a little slow.

I'd like to Fdisk my harddrive and reformat so that I can reinstall XP. After checking many times, I'm unable to find Fdisk on my system.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can accomplish this task? I am at my wits end, and if you really must know, I'd like to get everything working before my wife finds out that I've screwed it up.

Thanks for you time and tips.

 

[Valiant]

Okay... if you have the full version of XP you boot from the CD... just go to the BIOS and make sure it boots from the CD ROM drive before the hard drive. From there when it boots from the CD you should be allowed to format on the CD and then install.... but dependig on the format you use you can just use any boot disk you have laying around... but thats only if you are using Fat32....

 

[TheTechIsIn]

Sounds like he's using an OEM version of the OS, probably came with a Gateway, Compaq or Dell system ... your best bet would be to make a Win98 bootdisk -- you can get one at bootdisk.com, once your in the a:\ prompt the bootdisk you created will have fdisk on it, clear the partitions, create a new one ... then put in your OEM WinXp disk, reboot and do a reinstall. Since there wont be anything to install over at that point you should be ok.

 

[HempyDude]

Thanks everyone for their advice. I got it all fixed. Went to Bootdisk.com and got some XP disks. I'm so glad I took the time to use the Files And Settings Transfer Wizard. I hooked up a home network with my sons computer some months back so we could play games against each other. Didn't know that it would be this usefull when it comes to reinstalls. I didn't lose a single file, song, or game save.:clap: