Power outage during reinstall of XP

[elewi49]

While re-installing xp Professional on my computer the electrcity kicked off and upon rebooting the computer the booting sequence worked and went to a screen with a message xp setup is restarting. Then a new window comes up not enough virtual memory but the window disappears so fast I can't read all of the message. I have tried to use a boot disc to just reformat the hard drive but I have formated the drive with NTFS partitions and have yet to get into dos to reformat.
boot disc from Mircosoft do not work as I get a message I/O error when I try to reboot.
Boot disc for Win 98 doesn't work it lets me in but due to having NTFS partitions it stops at a certain point.
I still have active Cd drivers but cannot get into dos.
800 Mz Alton motherboard, 20 g harddrive

[jmichna]

If you can manage to get the HD utility program that your HD manufacturer (almost) always supplies (or D/L from their site), you should be able to re-partition the drive using the HD manufacturer's utility, or worst case, zero-write the drive to start completely from scratch.

[elewi49]

after two days of looking at the problem I decided to jusr format the hard drive to solve the problem of xp installation lock up and that was not easy. had to finally use a ME boot disc disc to get in and clean off the hard drive and then use a dos 6.2 boot disc to replace the files. Then had to load win 95 then load xp and finally I got rid of the NTFS partitions. NEVER AGAIN will I us NTFS partitions. Appreciate the information and Help.

[DoctorReno]

You are making a big mistake by not using the NTFS.

Frankly the method you used to load XP was convoluted and totally unnecessary. You have to realize that XP is not DOS based and for all practical purposes you should put those old 9x bootdisks away... they are unnecessary to installing NT based OS's like 2k and XP.

You should consider zero fill formatting the drive and then booting from CD to install XP, you did know that you can boot from CD with XP didn't you? Because of the zero fill the drive will be recognized as "RAW" you can partition and format from scratch. And unless you have some sound technical reason to not use NTFS you are definately better off with NTFS.

[jmichna]

I really don't think NTFS had anything to do with your problem, other than being more difficult -- on occasion -- to re-partition and re-format. Once you had learned how to go about it, then NTFS is no more difficult than FAT or FAT32 to re-partition.

On our 3 PCs at home, all run XP Pro, all use NTFS (one is dual boot with 98se running FAT32 on the 98se C: partition). My experience is that NTFS is more robust to unexpected shut downs, fragments much more slowly, is less prone to corruption, and has some real obvious security benefits (I don't mean to try to turn this into an NTFS vs FAT32 thread... too many of those already!) I'm only trying to suggest that you don't rule out NTFS simply because you had a bad experience during installation when a power outage occured; you were able to work through and solve the problem.