Formatting Help Needed!!!!!

Wiggins · 8 Aug 2007 at 10:08

HI

Since the weekend I have had Vista Ultimate installed on my new hard drive and I have decided now that its safe to get rid of my XP Pro that I have installed on a seperate Sata drive. I was dual booting.

I would like to now format the drive that has xp on as I shall use it for back ups, music, videos etc.....

I have tried to format the xp drive in vista but it doesnt let me. This leads me to believe I will probably need to be in some kind of dos mode to do this but unsure which route to take.

Do I boot the XP Disk and go to the repair in dos mode, pull up the drive letter that has XP on it and format then?

Your help will be appreciated

Burnsy2023 · 8 Aug 2007 at 10:10

Try it in safe mode before you try the recovery console.

Burnsy

Wiggins · 8 Aug 2007 at 10:13

burnsy2023 said:
Try it in safe mode before you try the recovery console.

Burnsy

OK, will do.

Ta

Wiggins · 8 Aug 2007 at 10:25

burnsy2023 said:
Try it in safe mode before you try the recovery console.

Burnsy

Safe mode did not work.

I did notice that when I installed Vista on the second hard drive that it added a bootsect.bat file on the XP Drive.

I can only assume this is for Vista to see that it dual boots.

If I use the recovery console will I then have to put the Vista disk in and repair the boot sector?

Edit: I dont want to loose Vista with formatting wrongly.

Pulseammo · 8 Aug 2007 at 10:46

I don't know if Vista has it (fixboot/fixmbr), but you'd need to download something like GParted live CD, format the XP drive with it, change the boot order in the bios to point to the secondary hard drive containing vista, boot to the vista dvd, go to the recovery console use the fixboot command for the vista drive, reboot and in theory it should work out. (Fix boot should sort out the boot loader since XP would be gone, you may also need to use fixmbr, I can't remember). But like I say, I've never done it with vista, so I don't know if its recovery console has those commands.

.walls · 8 Aug 2007 at 11:42

Pulseammo said:
I don't know if Vista has it (fixboot/fixmbr), but you'd need to download something like GParted live CD, format the XP drive with it, change the boot order in the bios to point to the secondary hard drive containing vista, boot to the vista dvd, go to the recovery console use the fixboot command for the vista drive, reboot and in theory it should work out. (Fix boot should sort out the boot loader since XP would be gone, you may also need to use fixmbr, I can't remember). But like I say, I've never done it with vista, so I don't know if its recovery console has those commands.

As above, except it's bootsect.exe on the vista dvd. fixmbr / fixboot will only work on pre vista windows.

Wiggins · 8 Aug 2007 at 12:04

Thanks for your help guys, I sorted it

I ran the recovery console from the Vista DVD and opened CMD from it.

I then dismounted the drive that had XP on and formatted. I then rebooted back into Vista's Recovery Console again and selected 'fix boot'.

It booted straight back into vista and it remounted the drive automatically

Jobs a good un!!!!!!!