How to format a harddrive that has vista preinstalled

Yes No. Sorry this didn't help. Thanks for your feedback. I accidentally Installed Windows on two drives and I want to delete one of them but it says it cant format that drives.

Can you help me? Sorry, I figured out that I cant format the main hard drive. Is there any way to change the main hard drive? This thread is locked. Try the steps given in the MS article to format the hard drive and then install XP.

Thanks for the link Santos. I wont be able to help him out until tomorow, so will let you know how things went. Zagreus, HTG recommends Dban and several members have used it with good success. It is a good wiping program. I think something else caused the BSOD.

Before his problems started how many partitions were on his hdd? What did he use Dban for? Did he realize what Dban actuallly does? There is nothing on his hdd after using Dban. A clean install is necessary. Hello GX. When i asked him to explain what happened when windows started to install, he said everything went normal loading files,drivers ect and then the blue screen appeared got no options at all with a lot of zeros ect.

I think it was a preinstalled system with Vista. He doesn't like Vista and tried to install xp over Vista and it didn't work, and being the impatient sod that he is, the clever cloggs downloaded DBAN and zapped his hdd completly. I assume he thought DBAN just formatted the hdd. Just as an added querie, i only ever used fdisk up to Win Me, after i restore the MBR and create a partition and format the hdd, will xp load up?

First Dban does not change or alter the hdd format. This said if he is going from Vista to XP he should format the hdd. I know WinXP install disk prompts you just after booting if you want to format your hdd. It's best at this time to download partition wizard burn to a Cd. It is OEM software sold by DELL, so it does not have the usual activation safeguards that retail software has, so yes you can cheat, but it is illegal, whatever you can live with I guess.

Browse Community. Windows General. Turn on suggestions. Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.

Showing results for. Search instead for. You will need to press continue. Then select Storage, Disk Management and right click on the partition on the bottom of the page and select delete volume. The Print Screen on the right explains it easily. Once you have deleted the partition simply right click on the unallocated space and select new simple volume. Follow the new simple volume wizard.