New PC

God Forsaken

Solid State Member
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Hello! I'm new here. Just bought a computer the other day. Bought all the parts and a friend helped me put it together. Anyways I need help with getting started with the formatting and partitioning of my hard drive. I've used a XP boot floppy disk and it worked. I than downloaded "fdisk" and put that in. We partitioned the hard drive without any problems so we than exited when told and the computer stated that we now need to format. But for some reason it won't format. Everytime we go into C: drive and try and format it it says something about a "media file not reading drive C:" or something like that and gives me 3 options 1) Abort 2) Retry 3) Fail. Anyways if someone could get back to me and let me know it would be helpful.
 
Try this go to your BIOS and set your cd-rom drive as your primary boot device then insert your windows XP cd
and reboot your computer. That should work unless you don't have windows XP on a cd wich would be hard to believe, if you don't I suggest you get one. Hope this helps.
 
NO FLOPPIES!!!
NO FDISK!!!
NO PARTITIONS IN DOS!!!

Use the CD from XP to start the installation process. Within the startup of the CD it will ask you how you want to install windows. At that point within the start up from the CD, you can choose what format you want, i.e. FAT16, FAT32, NTFS. I recommend NTFS. It is faster and uses most of you physical harddisk.

So, you haven't done this in awhile because using DOS to format a harddrive disappeared when Windows 95 came out.

P.S. After formatting in DOS by boot-up disk will not allow Windows to add a driver for the HDD that is over (God, I can't remember exactly but something like) 850MB. Therefore, when you start to install Windows it can't find a harddrive.
 
God Forsaken said:
I've only got a cracked version of XP on cd. Would that have what is required to boot??

if it is an exact copy, sure it will, but microsoft will not be happy with you if they find out, lol
 
winge windge wing, you lot listen here. (1st get any windows xp cd, cracked or non cracked.) (2nd tern pc on and press delete or F2 for setup) (3rd change the 1st boot up to D drive the 2nd hd.) (3rd save then rebout. (F10)) (4th inserte the cd and off you go. wate for a wile due to it installing all the drivers then when it comes up with 3-4 options press enter wich i think it format, then you reformat as NTFS i think, then it reformats then you make a new partition then, install the it resets then you go thro the crap on the cd then it resets again etc... ) (p.s. if you think uv done something wroing eg gone past something or not booting up in windows wate for a wile the leave it to reset etc../ any probs ask only me. iv done it on about 6 pc's so far with the windows xp home and pro cd ok. i know what im on about when making them.)
 
I did that i went into the thing and set it so primary boot up will be CD but when i put it in nothing happens and when i go to check the settings it has returned to its old settings.
 
did you save it when you exited the bios/setup and have you got a bios battary in there which ant ded.
 
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