Ok, My hard drive won' format so I can put XP pro on it fresh. I get this message: "Format not supported on Drive C: Format Terminated" I have tried booting from the XP cd, into safe mode and from a boot disk all with no avail. I have tried using partition magic to delete the primary partition but that seems to hvae made matters worse, any suggestions? I'm starting to go through good-machine withdrawl here!_X_X_X_X_X_[small]~Life is a liquid dream...let it flow! Carpe Diam, Quam Minimum Credula Postero![/small]
are you booting from the XP disc when you get that error? you could try boting with a 98boot disc and formatting that way. or stick the drive in some other system as a slave and format it that way, then put back in the system you are wanting it in. let me know if you get it going, and what method you used.
1. Use a simple boot disk and boot the computer without cd-rom support. 2. Type in fdisk 3. Allow large disk support 4. Display Partition information 5. If any partitions exist use the relevant options to delete them. 6. Create a primary dos partition. 7. When it asks you if you want to set the partition active: i. Hit yes if you wish to create one partition ii. Hit no if you wish to create more than one partition (AFAIK it will verify the drive again) When prompted enter the partition size wanted. Once that's finished create an extended partition. Create a logical drive in the extended partition. Then set the primary partition active. Format your hard drive then install XP.
Ok, I was able to use fdisk to get a good partition and to format the drive, but now when I try to install windows XP Pro, after loading all the components setup needs, my computer goes to this quasi blue screen of death. What gives? It won't install XP! Its getting pretty damn frustrating. Any thoughts on this are also appreciated.
Well I know it's not reccommended and I'm purely guessing at this, but you could try installing an older version of Windows then upgrading to XP?
did you allready tried with partition magic 8 to change to ntfs-file format? cause i know xp runs under ntfs and not that easilly under fat32. and it is by my knowledge impossiblle to reformat a drive to ntfs with fdisk. also you could consider to get win2k pro i use it and am quitte impressed with the stabillity and with the diffrent security settings of it.
Yes, the hardrive got really messed up somehow, be it a virus or my stupidity or whatever, using fdisk to creat a fat32 partition tho allowed XP setup to recognize a good configuration and in turn format to ntfs.
I had some of the same issues as you did and I'm still working the kinks out (most caused by my stupidity) but when I went to XP I eventally used FDISK to wipe the drive clean. I have a 120 gig drive and decided to not recognize the large disc support, since XP will reformat it anyway. One the drive was wiped clean I changed the Bios to recognize the cd-rom as first boot up device and XP started loading right up.
