Installation gone bad!

[yippiekyyay]

Hello,

long story short - after removing Linux and XP the hard way, I was left with a 2GB FAT C drive and a 20GB FAT32 D drive. I tried using partition magic, but it kept failing because it couldn't read from C (without giving me an option to choose another drive).

Anyways, here's what I'm seeing in Admin Tools - Computer Management - Disk Management

C: - Fat - Healthy (System) - it's identified as Primary drive - this is where I tried installing 98 hoping if I upgraded XP instead of full install, it might fix all the messed up partitians for me (yes, I was way wrong).
D: - Fat32 - Healthy (Boot) - this has XP Home - it's identified as a logical drive - it's also showing 2.5GB of "Free Space" and has a border around it, identifying it as an "Extended partitian".
*There is also over 3 GB of unallocated space.

I've already reformated what I could and reinstalled, so I don't care to salvage any of the data. Could someone help me to reformat my whole HD and format my C to a FAT32 please?

Thanks in advance,

-Sean

 

[smah]

What are your intentions? If you want to have XP use the entire drive as 1 large partition, just boot with the XP CD and start the installation. Just a short way into the installation, you will be asked about partitioning - remove all the partitions shown, then let xp do the rest.

 

[smah]

I forgot to add:

After you do that, XP will ask how you want to partition - NTFS or Fat32. As long as your drive isn't bigger than 32 GB (which I think it isn't), you can partition the entire drive as Fat32. If you want to leave some space for linux, don't partition the whole thing - leave some unallocated.

 

[IROBOT1]

Hey... Send me a valid mailing address, and I will will Send a boot disk with a low-level format utility that will wipe your drive clean as a baby's butt.

Mark Real

markreal55@comcast.net

 

[linney]

For help with plenty of "pretty pictures" try here.

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/indexwinxp.htm

HOW TO: Partition and Format a Hard Disk in Windows XP (Q313348)

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q313/3/48.asp

Read the paragraph,
"How to Partition and Format Your Hard Disk by Using Windows XP Setup."

 

[memorable]

i do not know whether this helps but you can try

You may have to have a bootable disk to boot up your system because your harddisk partition is like in a mess

Then you may want to try restore the partition by using DOS Mirror command
UNFORMAT/PARTN

Also, to recover FAT directories, and files, this variation of the unformat command sometimes also gives result:
UNFORMAT /U

However don't use FDISK to make a new partition table because it also overwrite the first few sectors on the harddisk.
However you can also use this command to restore the partition if possible.
A> FDISK /MBR

Hope all this helps you.

 

[yippiekyyay]

Hey - thanks for the responses everyone! I was surprised to see so many so quickly!

My intention is to be left with Windows XP (nothing else) and no partitians (except for any that are supposed to be there).

I have a lot of info to pour through here. I will repost again tonight when I've tried some of your suggestions (starting with reinstalling as smah suggested - I remember not being able to do anything with C though, but I'll make better notes this time).

Thanks again,
-Sean

 

[yippiekyyay]

Hey everyone - I'm back in business! I thought I'd reinstall (paying closer attention this time) as smah suggested first and that did the trick.

In case anyone else goes through something similar, when you delete a partition in the Windows XP setup it becomes "unallocated" space. If you delete several as I had to, it automatically merges the free space together (this is what was worryine me - I thought I'd be left with groups of free space as I didn't see an option to merge or claim space).

Anyways, all good now. Thanks to everyone who offered advice!

-Sean