format harddrive

stan56

i want to format my harddrive which is running on Me and upgrade to XP, how do i go about this as no screen comes up at startup telling me to press F8 or whatever so i cannot get into the boot from CD options
any help appreciated

petes

What model of computer do you have?

With all machines as soon as you turn on your computer you will get the bios screen. Look in the top left or right of this screen to see what to press to get into the bios e.g. on a dell it is normally on the top right.


By the way, have you done this sort of thing before?

stan56

petes wrote:

What model of computer do you have?

With all machines as soon as you turn on your computer you will get the bios screen. Look in the top left or right of this screen to see what to press to get into the bios e.g. on a dell it is normally on the top right.


By the way, have you done this sort of thing before?

Its a dell PC and yes i have done this many times before its just i'm trying to do this one over the phone to someone who has only did this sort of thing once or twice a good while ago and forgets most of it

Anti

You can actually run the upgrade from me to xp in windows just throw in the cd and explore the cd.

petes

Anti wrote:

You can actually run the upgrade from me to xp in windows just throw in the cd and look through the cd's files.

Would you not think a fresh install would be the better option here?

Anti

It does that, its just to bring him to the option screen. Where he can choose to format or install on another hdd/partition etc etc

azzeretti

You won't be able to format your PC from the BIOS!

You will need to be in some sort of OS to format the drive. The best way, is to boot from the XP CD and follow the install screens, near the start you will be asked how you would like to format the drive (NTFS, FAT) or you could leave it as it is.

stan56

azzeretti wrote:

You won't be able to format your PC from the BIOS!

You will need to be in some sort of OS to format the drive. The best way, is to boot from the XP CD and follow the install screens, near the start you will be asked how you would like to format the drive (NTFS, FAT) or you could leave it as it is.

how do i get it to boot from the cd? i need to get into the BIOS to set it up to boot from cd which i cannot seem to be able to do

petes

Anti wrote:

It does that, its just to bring him to the option screen. Where he can choose to format or install on another hdd/partition etc etc

Ah, I was under the assumption that it was a boot cd and not an upgrade disk.


Thank fook I had bugger all to do with me.

OP, what does your friend see when he boots the machine?

stan56

petes wrote:

Ah, I was under the assumption that it was a boot cd and not an upgrade disk.


Thank fook I had bugger all to do with me.

OP, what does your friend see when he boots the machine?

the black screen that says dell doesn't even come up it jus goes straight to windows me is starting up screen which is annoying cos it doesn't tell ya which button to press to go into the boot options

Anti

petes wrote:

Ah, I was under the assumption that it was a boot cd and not an upgrade disk.


Thank fook I had bugger all to do with me.

OP, what does your friend see when he boots the machine?

windows xp retail can be installed many ways. What you say is 100% correct. But you can use the gui menu on the cd to reboot into the cd and format / upgrade, which depends on what version of xp he got.

MarkR

In the bios (accessible by a number of different buttons, try F2) there should be something call boot device priority. Currently their computer is booting off the hard drive first, bypassing the cd. You want to have the cd as first boot device.