To cut a long story short, my partitions are a little screwed - to the extent that I can’t simply burn CD-R’s anymore.
The OS is on CD, and will normally install from the CD-Rom - but doesn’t offer full reformatting. I could really do with a full reformat of my hard drive.
However, I’m not quite sure how to go about it. My main concern is making sure that I can boot up after.
Any pointers would be welcome.
And - yes - I’m already all backed up for my normal file information (docs, etc). No idea about a boot disk, though.
What Operating system? And if your partitions are messed up…won’t you want to do an fdisk and re-partition, then format?
Any chance you just need to do some housecleaning? Remove programs you no longer use…clean out temp files, music files, etc? Or perhaps move them to another partition?
One caveat here is that if your OS is an “upgrade” version vs a “full” version it may not format and install to a non-formatted disk without an OS already being present or the OS install CD from the previous version that was upgraded being available for verification.
What do your partitions have to do with the ability to burn CD-R’s? Sounds like a munged-software situation to me, rather than something being wrong with the volume structure / file allocation hierarchy etc.
Why not back everything up using backup software, (making sure you have a copy of the backup software on a different bootable partition, of course), nuke the partition, then restore from backup? Wouldn’t that be a lot less frustrating and time-consuming than reformatting and reinstalling everything from scratch? (except your CD-burning software. I’d reinstall that from scratch, definitely).
I created a virtual partition while planning to install another OS - using Partition Magic. The partition was set to somewhere between my main C: and D: drives.
And suddenly I cannot burn CDs properly. It doesn’t seem to be a software issue - Nero and Easy CD Creator both suddenly crash and leave me with a wasted CD-R.
My theory is that the partition has screwed up something about the [insert correct technical term here] for the C: and D: drives.
It was an almost fresh reinstall of everything after a simple reformat of C: merely a couple of weeks before the issue - minimal software installed.
I’m not bothered about restoring any partitions - I simply wish to wipe my entire hard drive clean and start fresh.
I had been warned that I’d need a boot disk, though. So that’s what I’d like to ask - how do I reformat the entire hard drive and ensure that I can boot up afterwards?
I thought I’d ask here, in case anyone has some perferred links to a tutorial covering the issue.
Also a good trick before you install any new software is to make a back up of your registry.
On 98 go to “Start”…“Run” and type “Regedit”
Once that comes up click “export registry file”
Save it anyware you want, if you have any problems after install. Uninstall the software, and do all the steps above except import the registry file you saved earlier.
If I had a nickel for everytime that got me out of a glitchy install…
So, let’s say I want to totally reformat my laptop (no other suggestions, this is the what I’m doing :P)… I have the Compaq QuickRestore disks and a Windows 98 CD. It’s an older Compaq laptop… what would I do?
If you have the CDs to do a full install of your software, go find delpart.exe, originally from the Windows NT 3.51 resource kit. (It works with all MS systems).
Put it on a boot disk and run it. It will destroy all the partitions on a hard drive so you can use fdisk to repartition, reformat and reinstall to your heart’s content.
Initiating the QuickRestore install process will blow out the old disk partition image and completely re-image the drive. THat’s all you should have to do unless you have accessories attached like printers , PCCARDs or external mice that need their drivers installed as well.
Man, you know, I thought it would be easy to initiate the process, but when I pop the CD in, I just can’t find out where to start it. No autorun, and the “Compaq Support” thing disappeared!
If you boot the machine with the Quickrestore CD the restore process should intiate automatically when the machine boots up. Make sure the BIOS boot up process is set to look at the CD before the hard disk.