problems with hard drive

stevieg · 19 Aug 2007 at 17:46

im having problems with a dual boot of vista and im trying to resolve them on another forum that specialises with vista because i cannot get into wither vista or xp despite trying a number of different things,so what im wondering is ther any way of formatting a hard drive without having the computer turned on and if not (im currently using my sisters pc) is it possible to connect the HDD on which vista is loaded while this pc is running and format it then because if i install it before i turn on this pc and then try to format it im thinking that the same problem that i have would happen on this pc that i have on my own
then with my newly formatted HDD ill be able to do a clean install of vista and perhaps then try to retrieve some of the 150gb of data i have on the xpHDD on my own pc

i hope this has made sense and if not voice your concerns and ill try my best to answer them as clearly as possile

thanks in advance for any assistance given

enigmo · 19 Aug 2007 at 18:34

Do you mean you have two HDs, one with a broken dual boot from your machine and then your sisters PC with XP on it? Are these drives SATA or IDE? If IDE, just put your drive as slave, make sure hers is master and her PC should boot from her HD fine leaving you to wipe yours safely. If SATA, you should be able to just plug it in and the BIOS should still try and boot from the drive on channel0 first.

stevieg · 19 Aug 2007 at 18:43

yeah thats it,
my HDD i want to wipe is SATA and the one on my sisters is IDE,this wont cause a problem as i would like to have atleast on of the pc's working as i would have no access to help from here/the other forum?
and then from there im assuming when i do a clean install of vista i should be able to just reconnect my xp HDD and set my vista HDD to boot first and repair whatever is wrong with that from there

enigmo · 19 Aug 2007 at 18:48

Yep, it should be just that easy. I set up a Vista/XP dual boot and I did find it easy to set up with XP installed first and then Vista on a seperate partition, so should be just as easy with seperate drives and Vista installed first.

stevieg · 19 Aug 2007 at 18:51

that is good now all i will have to do is wait for a molex-sata power converter from ocuk and ill be back in business
thank you kindly

stevieg · 20 Aug 2007 at 17:29

a little follow up question if you dont mind,
on my vista hard drive i have 3 partitions one for vista itself,one for games and one for vids,pics and such, im assuming that i would only have to format the partition vista is on and not all 3,would i be correct? or would i be safer to format all three clear the partitions and start agan fresh