reformat problems

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milehighj

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Ok, so this has been an ongoing thing for me for the last 2 or 3 days with problems out the yin yang, but I'll just post the last part and hopefully you guys can help me out.

Basically, I'm trying to reformat, Windows XP Pro, won't boot from CD (tried setting cd-rom as first bootable drive in bios, won't do it, exhausted all those options). Made XP boot disk that I downloaded from the Windows page (the 6 disk version), but when I put the first disk in there and try and boot from it, it give the following error:

Boot: I/O Error Reading Disk
Please Insert Another Disk

So, I tried doing it using a Win98 boot disk, but it won't read my hard drive since it's already NTFS. Tried doing fdisk, but that didn't help either. When I go to my cd-rom drive and go to the i386 folder and attempt to run winnt, it returns an error saying that it cannot find a place for swap file.

I tried another winXP boot disk that I found somewhere else (loads smartdrv automatically) but it's the same thing, it basically won't find my hard drive.

Any help is much appreciated, I'm quite simply going crazy.
 
what you need to do is delete the NTFS partition....go into FDISK and then i beleve it's option 3 to delete a partition...then option 4 to delete non-dos partition...delete it....then restart the machine and go back into Fdisk...then use option 1 to create new partition then option 1 again to create primary partiton....then it should verify the disk and then it should create it....ok once its done with that then you need to exit fdisk....then reboot with the windows98 boot disk...then hit boot with CD-Rom support....then once it's booted to the command prompt...type FORMAT C: then it should take a while and format the new partiton....then insert the windows xp disk...and make sure the cd-rom is first in the boot order......go through the install and then select convert drive to NTFS you can either do the quick or the slow virsion...then it should install everything fine
 
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