Formatting Hard Drive

Currently XP. Trying to format hard drive to reinstall XP. easy I hear you say, thats what I thought as I have done several previous. However it has a OSloader installed and when I follow instructions to boot from CD it goes in a loop and brings up the osloader menu again. The support for uninstalling tells me to download the OSloader from the net but the machine is not currently internet ready and now it won`t load windows. just loops to the menu. Hope that makes sense. Any help anybody

 

Is the OS loader that you are talking about one for the CD, Windows or another OS, or from the motherboard.

 

Hi Ox, I believe it was downloaded to choose between XP & 98 when booting. the options are 4 you to set. i.e when I boot it gives options of a) hard drive b)XP C)98 d)cd. The hard drive was partition between XP & 98. Or is was till I reformatted the 98 partition.

 

Well, if you are trying to completely remove all from the disk go the the hard drive manufactures website and get their drive tool. Do a low level format to write 0's to the drive.
That will get rid of the bootloader. I wouldn't do a LLF if you want anything to remain on the drive though. It will erase everything.

 

thanks lemondrop. Problem is carn`t get passed the loop as above

 

Since you want to format anyway, can you boot with a DOS disk and completely delete any partitions with FDISK? Then make sure the computer is configured to boot from your XP CD.

 

Thanks Bob I have tried that but it gets caught in the stupid menu loop as mentioned above. After serveral tries and for no apparant reason it finnaly kick in the floppy drive started to load and then the machine then freezes. Is there any way of bypassing the boot sequence completly and go straight to DOS ?

 

Bri C, go into the BIOS (usually the DEL or F1 key immediately at startup) and find the boot order. Be sure that the hard drive is the very last on the list after the floppy and cdrom.

I don't see why else it would be hitting the boot menu before it scans for other bootable devices. The boot menu is on the HDD.

 

Why can't you boot with a DOS floppy, delete any partitions, create a new one and reformat, all from DOS.

 

Bob & Lemondrop

Its formatting as I type. dont know what happened. in shear frustration I kept on going round the loop after trying all your sugestions when it suddenly stared booting from my cd xp disc. Is it possible cd rom doon`t like cd?

your efforts not wasted. Lemon - never thought of manufacters website. found it and the drive tool but no floppy to suit capacity of prog. so put it on my memory pen but it wouldn`t boot from there. you only learn by trying, and I must remember to use the manu sites.

Bob - didn`t realise you could make a dos copy from windows so I found and did from my working machine (xp) and tried to boot from a: dive kick in and was loading and comp froze. tried several times to no avail.

32% now and rising HE HE

Thanks alot again lads. Knowing theres someone to ask gives you the confidence to tackle a problem and therefore learn

 

67% and rising

 

DANM !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Its crashed. trying to load windows "carnt find partition(0)" and other simmilar stuff. Going to try a few easy things 1st but i have feeling i`ll be back. Please keep an eye on my thread guys. I think i`m going to need you