"a" hard drive? Which hard drive? :) Not the hard drive you booted from. Windows won't eat itself, and hasn't been able to do that for a lot of versions. If you need to format the drive that you normally boot Windows from, you'll need to boot from something else. If you have a floppy drive like you mentioned, you could do that. Probably easier would be to boot from CD - your Windows install CD should be able to do it for you. After you format the drive, everything that was on it is gone. You'll need that install CD to re-install Windows anyway.
God hates us all, you know it's true, God hates this place. - Slayer 1726 Posts 10/03
Posted - Apr 3 2008 : 8:37PM
You don't need anything, boot from the CD. I have formatted 100s of time and I don't know the freakin prompts by hear...sigh Anyway, you'll get one prompt askin' to fix your current install, don't do it, continue on. The eventually u well get to a screen askin' if you want to install. Once there, choose the partition, press D to delete it, you will probably have to hit L to accept it and then all data is gone.... Pick that partition to continue on, tell it to format with NTSF and use the quick, unless you want it to test you HDD before installing windows. Then off you go. Windows will be installing. World Class Adult Reviews
Just don't do what I did. When I got my present computer, I gave my old computer away after transferring all the old data I wanted to save onto my present computer. Just to be 100% sure that there would be no porn hiding somewhere on my old computer, I reformatted its harddrive and tried to reinstall Windows XP. It all went great until I tried to reinstall the OS. That computer had originally had Windows 98 when I got it, and I had upgraded it to XP myself, with the upgrade version. When I tried to reinstall XP with that disc, it couldn't sense any previous version of Windows on that wiped hard drive, so it wouldn't install XP. Luckily the person I gave it to had an old copy of Windows 98, so they were able to install Windows 98 onto it just so they could use my copy of XP to upgrade. So, in other words, make sure that your copy of XP is the full version, and not the upgrade. But I guess that shouldn't be a problem if that computer is too young to ever have seen anything but XP.
Yeah. If you're going to buy a copy of windows, I don't think it really ever pays to buy the upgrade. I would always just buy the full version. Everyone I've ever talked to who bought the upgrade eventually had pretty much the same problems GJ described.
My past is a foreign country. Most things are different there, including word usage. 503 Posts 12/06
Posted - Apr 4 2008 : 9:23PM
This is a bit off topic, but I thought I'd mention that I avoid that situation by encrypting partitions on my hard drives and using only them for any and all porn files, including the location of the browser (with it's bookmarks). Not only can't the files be accessed, but they can't be opened or read by any program (including systems programs) or even physically retrieved using a direct hardware access proceedure (all that type of retrieval would reveal is encrypted data). These encrypted files are encrypted/decrypted on the fly with no visible delay, including image and video files. The operating system treats them as totally separate disks. ~Robert
This should probably be in a separate thread on encryption ... but since I'm not a moderator ... There are a couple of ways to transparently encrypt data on your hard drive, depending on the OS you are running: Macintosh has FileVault. Microsoft Vista has something similar (or so I've heard, since I don't use any Microsoft OS I can't speak from experience about Vista). Linux has CryptFS, a stacked encrypted filesystem. See 'http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/docs/cryptfs/cryptfs.html' for details. There is also a product called 'TrueCrypt' which runs on multiple platforms. See 'http://www.truecrypt.org'. Its also free, but I haven't used it so I can't comment on that either. I use CryptFS on Linux. I keep anything I want private on a usb flash drive which I mount with CryptFS as needed. The flash drive appears as unformatted when viewed without CryptFS. This prevents the situation where some 'official' sees that your flash drive holds encrypted data and demands you provide the encryption keys to unlock it. One thing to remember: encrypted means encrypted! If you lose or otherwise forget you pass phrase for an encrypted volume your data will be secure alright -- even you won't be able to read it! Hope this helps ... Enjoy life, use a Macintosh.
