Formatting Hard Drive problem

[Salsa Party Animal]

I had a clean out on my PC and restall windows but I couldn't reformat C: Drive. I use Windows XP. But I can reformat on F: ok.

Any suggestion to overcome the problem. Could it mean my hard drive is on way out ? I think it is 2 years old.

[marcus]

Howd you mean you couldnt format it - does it give you errors or anything? Booting from the XP cd will give you the option to delete/create partitions, and format the drive to NTFS during installation. Usually if I want a blank HDD, Ill delete all partitions, create a new one and format it to NTFS.

[vertigo]

Easiest way to do it and to avoid confusing yourself and the computer as to which drive you want to install to is to only have that drive connected. Unplug the IDE cable from your other drive. Then there's only one drive in there and as marcus says when you put your XP CD in, it'll say there's already an install on there and ask if you want to format the drive before doing a fresh install.