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How do you wipe a hard drive clean...

and uninstall windows. I don't care about anything on the drive. I just want to completely wipe it clean. I am a novice so please give as much detail as possible. Thank you. Frank

fmonte

just put the windows cd in and reformat the drive and reinstall the os

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brian

Thanks Brian. I did that, I even changed the boot order so that the dvd/cd would boot first but the system goes right to the desktop. I was expecting some kind of blue screen for windows set up. Can you walk me thru what I would from the desktop. Thanks again.

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fmonte

sure,

So as you did you go into the bios and set the dvd to boot
Then you put the cd into the drive and reboot the system.
There should be a screen that says press any key to boot to the cd.
Press any key.
It should lead you to a blueish screen and may take a min or two to load the drivers
then select install windows NOT repair windows.
It will go to the hard drive, delete your hard drive partition by d then l and hit enter on the unpartitioned space
Hit format quick ntfs
and it will install

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brian

which version of win you want to install??? remember that old versions of windows don't come in boot cds

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konzerte

It is a regular windows xp pro install disk(not a restore disk). I know the disk works because yesterday I got the computer from a ebay store and they sold it to me and it was listed as a machine with no os installed. Yesterday I put the disk in and had no trouble loading the os. I got the blue screen and it went without a hitch. But then I noticed that my c drive was an H drive. Come to find out the media readers caused this to happen. I know how to solve this problem next time around so my only question is:

How do I get that hd back to the way it was yesterday so that when I put the disk in, I will get the blue screen and will be able to proceed. The way it is now it boots to the desktop even though I get a black screen for a split second that says that I am booting from a dvd/cd rom(I adjusted the bios). The blue screen never appears.

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fmonte

Quote:

Originally Posted by fmonte
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How do I get that hd back to the way it was yesterday so that when I put the disk in, I will get the blue screen and will be able to proceed. The way it is now it boots to the desktop even though I get a black screen for a split second that says that I am booting from a dvd/cd rom(I adjusted the bios). The blue screen never appears.

well if you can't boot from the cd, the content of the hard disk is not the problem..

did you save the bios settings?? set the cd drive as the ONLY boot device, also check "boot other devices"... try with another boot cd (a linux live cd, for example) to see if it boots and discard any cd problem

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konzerte

It booted from this cd yesterday.

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fmonte

why don't you exorcize your cd drive?