issue regarding formating and other funky stuff

[Xcoder]

Heres the thing:

I have 2 HDD, and obviously I have installed XP pro on one. I just installed another copy of XP on the second HDD hoping to terminate some problems I was having with the drivers of some audio card and MIDI keyboard I bought.

The thing is that I want to format the first HDD but I cant get rid of the old Windows folder. I tried different ways (i.e. DOS) and nothing, the info on the HDD will not delete....why? and how should I format that HDD?

[Electroman]

Have you set the second HDD as the boot disk? Then wouldn't you be able to use that version of windows to format the first one?

[Xcoder]

Originally posted by Electroman
Have you set the second HDD as the boot disk? Then wouldn't you be able to use that version of windows to format the first one?

I have, and I believe that because of read only files on the windows folder that I cant get rid of some damn hidden files (ant therefore taking almost 4 Gigs of space)....maybe they are temp or something, thats why I want to crush them with a rude format but I cant seem to get it to work....

[Electroman]

Posted by Xcoder
I have, and I believe that because of read only files on the windows folder that I cant get rid of some damn hidden files (ant therefore taking almost 4 Gigs of space)....maybe they are temp or something, thats why I want to crush them with a rude format but I cant seem to get it to work.... Your not just trying to delete the files are you? If you run a format program on the drive then it should delete even the hidden fiels regardless. BTW to format the drive I recommend you just boot from the XP disk and it has some formatting tools in the installation process ;).

[dglienna]

I booted to an ME floppy which included FDISK which blasted everything. Watch out, though. Even if you disable a hard drive in BIOS, FDISK can find it. It is still possible to format the wrong drive. [came *this* close to making a big mistake...]

[Ideas Man]

Then you didn't disable it right. FDISK can only operate on drives the BIOS detects and initialises. If you turn it off properly, it will still turn on, but if the BIOS doesn't initialise it, nothing will use it. Easy way to prove, if you watch your boot, something goes a miss and it doesn't detect a drive that you know works, Windows won't detect it either because the BIOS hasn't.

[Xcoder]

weird enough, I have tried booting from the winXP cd and while in DOS, I couldnt find FDISK...so I did a good old format c: and everything then was wiped out....thanks for the precious info lads..

[dglienna]

That's what I'm saying. I changed BIOS to NONE INSTALLED, SAVED, and EXITED. Then I booted to the ME boot floppy, and FDISK found 2 drives (0 and 1). They were reversed as far as MASTER and SLAVE, but that shouldn't have mattered.
The only way I could make sure that it was disabled was to physically unplug it.
When the computer booted up, only ONE drive showed up on the screen. That's why I was shocked.

[<ABX]

Originally posted by dglienna
That's what I'm saying. I changed BIOS to NONE INSTALLED, SAVED, and EXITED. Then I booted to the ME boot floppy, and FDISK found 2 drives (0 and 1). They were reversed as far as MASTER and SLAVE, but that shouldn't have mattered.
The only way I could make sure that it was disabled was to physically unplug it.
When the computer booted up, only ONE drive showed up on the screen. That's why I was shocked.

Even if you disable the drive in the BIOS, the Windows XP Install CAN detect it. I wiped out the wrong drive because of this once before. So I beleive him.

[dglienna]

I came *this close* to wiping out the wrong drive, but I figured if XP found it anyways, I couldn't guarantee which drive was 0 and which drive was 1, so I unplugged it to be safe.