cant reformat?

Crusha19

Crusha19

Aspiring Poker Player
I went over to my friends house to help him with his laptop. It has been running very slowly and I advised him to reformat it so he invited me over to help him. Now, I have never installed XP, but am very farmiliar with 98SE. Are there any major differences when installing the two? Anyway, i hold down F8 to go to the boot menu and there is no option for Boot in MS-DOS mode. I booted to safemode with command prompt and typed "format c:" said yes and it said something about the data having to be unmounted and i say yes again. Next it says that this operation failed or something to that effect. Next i tried putting in the XP cd. I go to windows setup and enter the repair console, which looks like MS-DOS mode to me, and try to reformat from there. It asks for the admin password and i put it in. I say yes when it tells me that i will lose everything, and nothing happens. All it does is move to a new line on the prompt. Next I tried to do a repair install, but I think that the disk must be scratched or something because I had to cancel many files because they could not be found. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Formatting differs from 98 in XP, the easiest way would be to run the setup, and it should ask you if you would like to format the drive, or if it asks you which drive you would like to install it on, you might have to delete the partition you would like to format, and then format it.
 
you need to either boot from a floppy and then do a format or boot from the XP SP2 CD to install XP, during setup XP install will ask you if you would like to format your disk, depending on how you do it XP SP2 will ask how you wish to format your drive (FAT32, NTFS of leave current FS as is)
 
Ya i saw that delete partition thing but didnt know if it would screw anything up if i deleted it. If it was my comp I wouldnt care, but it is my friends family's comp so I do. Also, which file system is best to use?
 
The easiest way to solve this is just to reinstall Windows XP. The hard drive will get formatted automatically so theres no need to bother with it.

You should always format a Windows XP partition in NTFS. The Windows installation will take care of this for you.
 
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