Need tips to format hard drive

[mach04]

A friend of mine has recently tried to reinstall his Windows XP home edition on his drive. He has some how made a mistake during installation, that there are now 2 different windows installations on the same drive. The hard drive is not partitioned and through DOS I have tried to format the drive but no luck as it says that this drive is also in use by another program, which I presume its the second windows.
How is it possible to format the drive in this condition so both windows installations along with the rest of the files can be removed ??

 

[jmaddone]

When you are in DOS in XP, you are still in XP, just in a command prompt for XP. The best way if you do not mind losing all of your data is to re-install Windows. After you accept the EULA in the Windows Installation, it will ask you what drive and partition you want to install Windows on. From there you can delete partitions, reformat the drives and partition. At that screen, delete the partition that all the Windows Installations are on, and to reformat and repartition (if wanted) the drive. I would recommend if you do reformat to use NTFS. You are able to install different installations of Windows on the same drive as long as you name the windows directory different for each of them (i.e. WINDOWS, WINNT).

Hope That Helps.

 

[linney]

HOW TO: Partition and Format a Hard Disk in Windows XP (Q313348)

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q313/3/48.asp

Read the paragraph,
"How to Partition and Format Your Hard Disk by Using Windows XP Setup."


For more help (shows enlargeable screenshots) go here.

http://www.blackviper.com/Articles/OS/InstallXPPro/installxppro1.htm

 

[mach04]

Do I get a fresh hard drive after reinstalling windows, cos there are some unwanted files on the drive that has made it work slower. Other files have been taken a back up so there wont be a problem to lose the whole data.
One more thing what does EULA and NFTS stand for?

 

[jmaddone]

EULA - End User Liscense Agreement
NTFS - NT File System

 

[linney]

Do I get a fresh hard drive after reinstalling windows"

You will if you format the drive before you install Windows.
Format removes everything on the partition of the drive before you install the operating system.