DescentBB

hey, any suggestions on software other the fdisk to reformat and clean my HD? i do this about once a year and my knowledge is woefully outdated. I'll be reinstalling XP Pro. The HD is ATA100. an old Quantum Fireball iirc. (later acquired by Maxtor)
Thanks!

During the install of XP it will ask you where to install it. On that same page you can delete the partion and format it as part of the install routine.

Yup, boot off the XP CD and do a quickformat during the install process.

......

yer joking right?

It's that simple?
I remember that now that's it's mentioned.

wow. Ok!

thanks guys!

...Duper walks away puzzled at the prospect.... something is horribly amiss here.. could have Microsoft done something so genuinely efficient??? no.. it couldn't be. They must have farmed that part out ... that or it was hacked in just before the ISO was sent to the burn house....

curiouser and curiouser....

if u want to be ainle u can do a LLF (low level format)

heh,

that's not always a good thing to do on modern drives.

but no.. not that tight today kthxbye

Warlock wrote:if u want to be ainle u can do a LLF (low level format)

LOL

"you do not "low-level-format" IDE or S/ATA hard drives"

Thankfully you cant.....(except a few 36GB SCSI drives)

Medium Level Formatting the best you can do, and those are done with the utilities from the HD's MFG website

hehe.. Warlock needs to take his A+ Cert test again.

There's still SCSI you can do that with? Well, at 36Gig, those would be rather \"old\".

Install went well. Better than usual. ...but that's probably me getting it right finally. Having trouble connecting to the net. Might need to reset the router.

Duper wrote:Having trouble connecting to the net. Might need to reset the router.

Ethernet drivers installed?

x2.

My Gigabyte motherboard needed those drivers installed from the motherboard drivers CD.

The XP Pro SP3 CD didn't have the drivers I needed.

Always Desktop/Laptop even if XP

been down this road so many times... it's not funny Try this on XP downgrades from vista only machine ..OMFG no such thing as drivers from the MFG's website

go to mobo/mfg site

grab the following drivers and install in a very specific order up to a point

#1 Chipset/Motherboard
#2 Microsoft UAA (unless Realtek go to 2a)
#2a Audio (Realtek has UAA embedded)
#3 Modem (otherwise it nags you on every reboot(laptop))
#x NIC (unless Nvidia was part of chipset)
#x VIDEO
#x misc touchpad/SD reader/Wireless

Older Motherboards that were not VISTA ready after the chipset it doesn't really matter....

O/S Service Pack

Duper wrote:i do this about once a year and my knowledge is woefully outdated.!

Err... You should look into making a drive image with something like Acronis True Image. In about 20 minutes you can restore a previously made image to your PC, complete with settings and drivers.

Ethernet: It's all nVidia software. .. oh wait, I'm using a nic card now. no, I installed those drivers. well both really. I'll look into it later tonight. It was running fine before the reformat. .. same updates and such. .. I keep all the driver updates on another HD.

Mr. Prefect. I don't keep anything worth backing up on my front drive. If I do, I burn it off on a disk from time to time. So a drive image is useless to me. .. I want to get RID of all the junk on that drive. I appreciate the input though.

I think what Mr. Perfect is saying is.... When you have a fresh install with drivers and completed updates. Then make a drive image.

ahhhhhhh. now THAT's a great idea!

oh, btw, net's working now. Guess I needed one more reboot. *shrug*

Thanks Guys!

Exactly! Considering how long it takes XP to format, install, add drivers, grab the updates and then set everything up the way you like, having an image of a clean PC is a massive time saver.

best of all, you've just now made the clean version to image.