How do I Erase my hardrive, operating system and all?

Question

I have an old Dell that has been upgraded several times. At the moment I cannot boot it up. It starts at the main boot screen but freezes on the wallpaper screen and does nothing else. I have tried to boot it in safe mode and everything else i can think of. I beleive the current OS is not working properly. I want to try to erase the harddrive completely and then reinstall windows XP and everything else. but I don't know what I need to do if I can't boot it up completely. I have also though about buying a new harddrive, but i don't want to spend the money if the PC is a lost cause. So does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

1. You don't need to erase it as it still contains your data.
2. Buy a 2nd harddisk, use the Recovery CDROM to re-install WIndow$, then attach the old harddisk to the new one and hopefully you could recover your data, copy the data from the old harddisk to the new one.
3. Keep the old harddisk as a backup after the recovery.

Answer 2

Boot to the BIOS and make sure you can boot from the CD.
Put the XP Pro CD in the drive and reboot.
The installation should start.
Yo will se a screen that asks if you'd like to delete the current drive/partition - say yes.
Create a new partition.
Format the new partition with NTFS.
Take a break - this will take a while.

All of the old drive is irrelevant at this point.

Run through the install.

As an option if you can boot from a floppy - create a boot nuke disk. There are several available - the following works well. In this case you don't have to be careful with it!

You can download the latest version of Eraser and the
required libraries at Eraser home page.

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/


Build the floppy on another pc so you can nuke your hard drive contents too start over.

HAve fun.

Answer 3

Sounds like reformatting is your only hope. You'll have to go into your BIOS and boot from your XP disk. This will automatically erase your drive and lay down a fresh copy of your operating system. (First just try to restart your computer WITH the XP disk already in the CD drive. If this doesn't work, try the BIOS boot from the XP disk.
I would avoid just buying a new hard drive. If your computer is already old, then invest the money in a new laptop or something. You wouldn't rebuild the engine in a Ford Pinto would you? Fact is, its probably the mother board dying a slow death and a new hard drive won't help.

Answer 4

well if your hard drive is working then all you need is a boot table windows xp CD to format your hard and install xp...

well try to boot from the xp CD...

it will ask whether to repair (f3) or install a new OS by clicking enter (i think..)

then do as what it says.. if it show your current OS and asked whether to install on it or repair (what ever) just ignore and continue...

the it will come to a point where it show you the partition table... you can delete and create partitions.. but remember to make partitions out of the whole hard drive... if you missed here, you wont see the missed free space in the OS...

after that select the partition which you need the OS to be installed and format it with either ntfs or fat32... and then install...

remember to install your drivers for the peripherals... (windows xp most of the time install the drivers ) but in case....

note: you can also repair you boor records by choosing repair...

Answer 5

Boot your system from the Windows XP CD. If it still freezes, the problem isn't the operating system. If it boots from the CD, you'll have the option to delete your existing partition and create a new one.

Answer 6

If you have the Windows XP CD, put it into your cd drive and boot from it. There you can remove the current partition layout and create a new one. Then format it using NTFS and then install Windows.

Answer 7

Goto Dos prompt, Enter fdisk. Delete hard drive partitions, then setup new partition exit fdisk and reboot.
Boot from CD or Floppy Disk to run windows setup which will first reload operating system and then windows.

Answer 8

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Answer 9

If it gets to the windows background like its getting ready to log you in i doubt its you hard drive it probably a missing sys file put your windows xp cd and u can reinstall from there

Answer 10

can it handle XP?
What OS is on it now?
Go to My Computer - Right click on C drive and format. You will then have to make sure you have the OS disk to reinstal.