Why wont windows xp let me reformat??

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Dav536

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I am trying to clean up a very nasty mess on my wife's moms pc. It heavily used on the internet buy 4people. I have just decided to reformat and reinstall windows. But when I try to do this it tells me I cant do this. Is there another way to get around this?? What is the easiest way to reformat?

Thanks,
Dave
 
Hi

Are you booting the with the winXp disk in and.Or you puting the disk in from within windows.You might have better luck booting off of the disk.If you are and still have no luck you gan get ahold of a windows 98 boot disk.boot off of it and chouse withoyt cdrom support. then at the A: Prompt type format C: or whatever the drive letter is.
 
Ok well I have been messing around with it and got to the point when I can reformat the drive, but then tells me that there is not enough space to run. So I checked out task mgr and there is 36 programs running and more than half I cant shut down, and the CPU usage is at 98-100%. Anyone have any ideas on how to get past this??

Thanks,
Dave
 
Hey

It sounds like your doing this from within windows.That is your problem.You need to put the windows XP cd in the Drive and restart the computer and boot off of the cd rom.Then run the setup from there .It sonds like you have to much garbage on the computer to do it from within windows.
 
sPlAtOiD speaks of the truth. You will never be able to format the drive inside of Windows since it contains the active partition. As mentioned boot up from the XP CD and go that route. The instructions are pretty basic, but if you need some guidence I always reccomend this tutorial since it provides graphics in case there is a question at some point during the install.

This is a link curtousy of the fine people at www.bootdisk.com

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sg_clean.asp
 
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