How to format a disk using the bootable windows XP cd.

[Messerschmitt]

There has been over a year since I installed windows or formated a drive with it. Now I got a new hard drive, but I can't seem to manage to format it without installing windows files as well. The single way I manage to format it is to tell the setup I want to install a copy of Windows on it that way having the format option. But I don't want any windows files being copied on the drive. Even if it just formats and it copies the files, and then I cancel when the windows instalation window comes up, the next time I restart or power up the computer it recognise it as having 2 windows system and it's trying to finish the windows installation.

How exactly did you just format a disk without installing the windows system from the windows XP cd?

The disk is already NTFS format so formating it from DOS is not an option

[colinbate]

If you can still boot into windows go to controll panel/administrative tools/computer managment& click on disk managment

Regards

Colin Bate

[Biohead]

Insert the disc, boot from it and use the recovery console option. You should be able to use the format command from there.

Alternatively, if you have your other hdd connected up, just boot up into that installation of Windows and right click on the new drive and select format.

[Messerschmitt]

Oh right on. I have tried to right click on the drive and hit format but there was an error preventing me to format. Today I created a folder so I can try some commands in dos and now the right click and format worked.

Never done this before (since i remember that on my old computer both HDD's have been formated with Windows XP CD) formating a HDD in windows. Is the "allocation unit size - 4096 bytes" correct? Some lower values where available

[bledd]

yup 4096 is default

[Messerschmitt]

Cheers.

And the last question I have about this is: Is it normal that a newly formated drive (the hole 120GB HDD since it only has 1 partition that I formated) have about 67 mb used space out of the total? I have un-checked all the settings for the folder options including revealing the operating system files and all the files on the drive does not totalitate 1 mb.

[LLXX]

That is normal, some space is occupied by filesystem tables after formatting.

[Messerschmitt]

Great, thank you all