Re: Reformatting the C system drive

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Ron Hirsch wrote:
I think that my C drive is having some issues, and I have a replacement drive to use if indeed the drive itself is beyond having a reformat resolve the issues. Before installing a new drive, which I'll preformat outside of the machine in question, I'd like to take a shot at formatting the existing drive in place, and then restore a current image of that drive via my True Image boot CD.

So I want to reformat my 400 GB C while it's in place in the machine. If I boot up into Windows, and go to a command prompt, and then key in "format c:" - will I then get a message staing that it cannot do that while Windows is running, and will do so the next time when I start a "bootup", following which of course, it will not boot up, as there will be nothing installed on the C drive. If this will work, I could then boot up from the TI recovery CD, which will run True Image from the CD, and allow me to restore an image that I created before starting this whole process.

But can I format the C drive this way? I see no path to do the format process in True Image ver 11 capabilities, or have I missed this.

I know I can remove the drive, and format it via an external USB connection to another machine, and then put it back in place. But I'd like to avoid the added work to do it this way.

How about my Knoppix or Bart PE disks - are they a usable choice also?

Ron Hirsch

I know booting the XP install CD gives you the option to partition and format the partition prior to installing XP. I do it all the time. If you do this and can't stop the install, (I can't remember if it goes immediately into the load or not), then you have simple options.
1 - open the cd and let it error during the load and then power off.
2 - let it load XP a bit then when it reboots just insert the TI boot CD and overwrite what was loaded.

I kept an old win 98 boot disc I keep around with format and fdisk on the floppy just for the heck of it. But external cases have almost made this worthless.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Reformatting the C system drive
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