Re: reinstall xp

Mark Adams wrote:


"John John (MVP)" wrote:


Mark Adams wrote:


"Big_Al" wrote:



Mark Adams said this on 1/6/2009 10:11 AM:


"Dan @ Jacque" wrote:



Can I do a clean install with an upgrade version of windows xp? I know I was able to do one with windows 95 many years ago. Does anybody have any ideas on this. I want to format my hard drive and all I have is an upgrade xp. Thanks for any help.




Yes, you can clean install. Go to the website of the maker of your hard drive. Download the formating tools for your model hard drive, make a bootable CD from the download. Use the tool to partition and format (choose NTFS) the drive. Put in the XP CD and install on the formatted partition you just made. Use the product key that came with the upgrade CD. The install will ask for a qualifying prior version of windows CD. When prompted, insert a Win 95, 98, ME or even a XP OEM CD. The install will then prompt you to reinsert the Windows XP CD and the install will proceed. Works very smoothly as long as you have the qualifying media.

If the OP has another win95 etc CD, this is great.
If "and all I have is an upgrade xp" means he has no other CD's, this won't work.

If I recall correctly, during the install of XP you can format the drive, without the formatting tools from the drive vendor.


If you have a large drive to format, using the XP disk may take most of an hour sometimes; to complete the format. The tools from the hard drive manufacturer take just a few seconds or minutes. You can download the tool, create the bootable media, and format the drive in less time than than the XP disk takes to do the format. You now have the bootable media for future use for free. Your mileage may vary, but for me XP's format is always WAAAAY slower for some reason.

If you want to format FAT32 other non-Microsoft tools will do the job
just fine but if you want to use the preferred NTFS file system you are
better off using the Windows XP utilities. The proprietary nature of the NTFS file system along with the revisions introduced in almost each new Windows version makes most of these third party tools less than reliable at handling the task. Not many third party companies hold license to provide NTFS formatting utilities, the only one that I can think of which /may/ be licensed is Paragon.

John


Gee, you learn something new every day. I've used Maxblast, Diskwizard, and Lifeguard for Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital hard drives and all of them can format FAT, FAT32, or NTFS. They can also make separate partitions of differing formats so "Alias" can dual boot. They can clone your old hard drive to a new one of the appropriate make. Maxblast even works for those old Quantum Fireball disks in older machines. I've used all of these and I've never had any formating trouble with any of these utilities, and they are free. Hitachi and Toshiba probably have similar utilities as well. One advantage the XP disk has is that it will format anybody's hard drive, which the others will not.

In which case you wouldn't really know if your drive was formatted to NTFS 3.0 or NTFS 3.1 and you wouldn't know whether or not the extra metadata files created on an NTFS 3.1 formated disk are present or not. Later on this may come back to haunt the user and it may cause problems if a fix or new feature is intended to make use of these metadata files. This is something that Vista users are beginning to see when they sometimes have used non Microsoft tools to format their drives NTFS.

John
.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: NTFS and FAT32
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