Formating a computer for dumbs

[Procyon]

Well, I want to format the HD of a Laptop, but I'm not very good at computers. Can you give me a guide to makeit right?

[erjin999]

Just format ? I would use a bootCD of some sort. Most laptops dont come with floppies, and I dont know how well they will boot off USB floppies, so a bootCD would be the way to go.

Two bootCDs below:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hiren.thanki/bootcd.html

Both go above and beyond just formatting, but do include formatting too !

Personally I use the second one and find it invaluable (I dont think it can be downloaded from that site, need to find it elsewhere).

[Procyon]

I don't know if "formatting" is the correct word. I just want to delete everything of my HD and reinstall windows xp.

[erjin999]

Yeah, well, it is formatting but you can do that with your bootable WinXP CD.

When you put the XP CD in as though you are going to install it, it will recognise that there is a copy of XP already there and ask what you want to do. Just tell it that you want to format the Hard Drive.

[Phoenix]

first click install a new version of Windows XP

then select the partition and press D (if i remember right) then just follow the directions on screen.

When you have deleted every partition,

press C and create your new partitions

give in the size of the partition (f.e. split your diskspace in 2 partions evenly divided)

or just hit enter (install windows to the disk) if you want only a c drive (it will create a C partition with the maximum available size.

Then choose quick NTFS format, and setup will start.

(note: when deleting a partition, data on that partition is lost)