Monday, July 29, 2013

How To Reformat The Hard Disk Using Windows XP Installation CD

If you have problems using your Windows XP machine, which is having frequent system restarts, understand that either your Windows XP operating system is corrupted, or your system is infected with viruses. Having a corrupted OS can cause real headaches as your system won’t let you perform your usual tasks on your computer. Your system may often freeze on you or restart without any reason. If you have tried several troubleshooting steps to fix this problem and are exhausted, the final option would be to reformat the computer hard disk drive and reinstall Windows XP once again. But you need to be aware that doing this will erase all your data on the hard disk where you are performing the format.

Reformatting the hard disk and reinstalling the OS will definitely improve the system performance and speed. The format function of Windows XP can be used to format the hard drive at the time of OS installation, or to format USB flash drive or memory cards if they are already installed on your computer. Below mentioned are the Windows XP help guidelines which will help you to format the hard drive using Windows XP CD.

How to format using Windows XP CD

  • Switch on your computer and insert the Windows XP installation CD into the computer’s CD drive. The system will now try to boot from CD. You will be prompted to press the Enter key to boot from CD. Press the Enter key.
  • When you get the "Welcome to Setup" screen, you need to press the Enter key again. To accept the licensing agreement, press the F8 key.
  • Windows XP installation wizard will now appear on your computer screen. Follow the onscreen instructions to proceed through the wizard. 
  • The wizard will clearly tell you what to do next. Since your hard disk is already partitioned and formatted, you need to delete the existing partition and do a fresh format to install the Windows XP OS. 
  • Delete the partition by pressing “D” , and then press “C” to create the partition. Now that you have successfully partitioned your hard disk drive, you need to format it. Select the option "Format the partition using the NTFS file system" which will format your hard disk in NTFS format. 

Avail Windows XP help from Microsoft Support Center and know more about using the XP installation CD to format different devices.