I have XP Pro and I'm trying to format my hard drive. I was able to format all my partitions except C: because it keeps telling me that programs are running in the backround and I'm unable to continue. It won't let me.
You may have already done everything you need to do...
However, there are some shortcuts...The simplest way to rapidly get things formatted is to get a blank floppy, obtain a Win98SE boot disk image from the internet and then start the computer.
choose start computer without CD support. Then look at what drive letter the RAMDRIVE is. Go to it by typing e: at the prompt or whatever it actually is.
Then, assuming you have c drive only, type in:
format c: /v:label /q
this means format c drive using FAT32 with the name 'label' and do it (q)uickly.
This should complete in about 10 sec depending on speed and size of drive.
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Then reboot without the floppy in drive and with XP disc in and press any key when it asks if you want to boot.
Windows should give you the option to reformat using NTFS...if you want this...it will take a long time.
Otherwise, I think you can do something similar to the quick command for FAT32 using the recovery console which is F2 or something on the startup process for XP.
Hope that helps in future.
You can find a lot of posts similar to this by searching the forum...there are masses of posts dealing with this issue.
Thank you for your reply,(at last)
i was thinking at first like you suggested(98 se)but then got a better help and it worked.
i simply poped the XP cd in and rebooted,set my bio to boot to cd-rom and the rest is history....... thanks again.
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