HELP, please!!!

[lunachick]

I am trying to fix my sister's PC. She uses WinXP, and she wanted me to get it sorted it out with a reformat and then partition her harddrive into 2 drives.

I told her to start backing up anything important onto cd's and then to just delete stuff, and then I'll get to the rest later. I told her not to worry too much about how she deleted things as I would be wiping the drive anyway.

So...she ripped into it, and now I cannot get WinXP to reformat the drive, and when I tried to reinstall WinXP over the top of what is already there (in an effort to get things up-to-scratch enough to use the reformat tool), it wouldn't reinstall properly as the file dmio.sys is missing.

There is no setup in the Bios (which I can't even access like I can on my DOS/Win 98 system), to make the floppy bootable so that I can try to reboot and reformat using a Win 98 boot disk.

Can anyone here help me?

 

[Foofish]

Have you try to Delete the partition during the XP installation? Sounds to me like you are trying to install OVER the original installation. During the installation process, WinXP ask you which partition you want to install it on. I believe you can delete a partition at that time. I'd delete that partition and then try reinstalling.

 

[4thwatcher]

lunachick, what is your sister's pc? anyway, it is true that its' difficult to reformat a hdd loaded with winxp (or other OS). the trick which i usually do is boot using either win98 or win2000 installation cd's then, format the hdd if it says so already. there are instances where you are unable to format the hdd straight away, therefore, clear the original partitions first, then, re set partitions again. (this way, all data are now wiped out).

 

[Heathen Dawn]

If I get it right, then you have no choice but boot from CD? The XP CD boot installation does let you reformat the drive (it shows you the options for partitioning and filesystem formatting after all the drivers have been loaded). If you can&#8217;t do that, then you may have to obtain a Win98 installation CD and boot from there into MS-DOS mode with CD-ROM support. There you&#8217;ll find FDISK (for partitioning) and the FORMAT command (in <cd drive>\win98\) for formatting a filesystem.

Alternatively, you can copy the entire i386 directory from the WinXP CD to the fixed hard drive, boot into MS-DOS mode and type winnt to start the install.

 

[lunachick]

Hey, thank you, guys; you've been most helpful.

Her PC does only boot from CDR then CDRW, as the floppy was not assigned in the boot sequence in the BIOS. I did finally manage to get it to boot from the Win98 CD, and I've formatted the drive from there. I'm now using Win98's FDISK, and once I've divi'ed up the hard drive into two equal parts, we'll be away laughing! I hope!

Thanks again!

Petra.

 

[4thwatcher]

Hey, thank you, guys; you've been most helpful.

Her PC does only boot from CDR then CDRW, as the floppy was not assigned in the boot sequence in the BIOS. I did finally manage to get it to boot from the Win98 CD, and I've formatted the drive from there. I'm now using Win98's FDISK, and once I've divi'ed up the hard drive into two equal parts, we'll be away laughing! I hope!

Thanks again!

Petra.

cheers

 

[Foofish]

I'll double that cheer . Glad to see something is working