Win XP install help. Reformating taking foever?

Question

I am reinstalling XP on my computer. I had to reformat the drive since it had way too much crap on it. The reformatting has taken about 4 hours. It was at 90% for about 45 min, and an hour later, its at 93.

Is there any reason it would take this long? Did something go wrong? should I just start over?

Thanks for the help. ^_^

Answer 1

I'd not be ready to buy a new HD yet.

Give this a shot. You obviously have internet access. Go to http://www.download.com and search on and download a little program called Killdisk. Copy it to a CD or to a Floppy whichever is easier for you.

Place the floppy or cd in the appropriate drive and reboot the PC. Killdisk will launch. Follow onscreen prompts and let it rewrite/erase your entire HD.

Killdisk will rewrite your entire hard drive with 1's and 0's. That will completely delete anything/everything you ever had on that HD.

Depending on your HD size it will take some time. Be patient. You will see the progress indicator but it's a slow running process to do all this. Once it's done put the XP disk in the CD drive and shut down the PC.

Reboot the pc and the XP disk should boot up. Follow on screen prompts to reinstall XP from scratch.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

3 things could be the issue:

You either have...a slow processor...a HUGE hard drive...or your hard drive is damaged(it happens, not too often though) OR a combination of all 3 of these things.

Answer 3

bad hard drive, assuming the format finishes, you will error out writing the os on the drive. just replace the hard drive, they pretty cheap nowadays.