i've lost some application files!

[Guest_imported]

i've lost some of my appilcation files. now my some programs are not working properly. been to a good computer shop and they advised me to format my hard drive, i,m having diffculty's doing this? my o\s is xp. what am i doing wrong?

 

[Tempest8008]

If you are running XP, you should be able to boot from the CD and allow XP to repair itself.

If you want to reinstall your OS and wipe your hard drive completely, you will need to boot from a floppy disk that has fdisk on it.

Run fdisk and delete all partitions, reboot, run fdisk again and recreate the partitions. Reboot again, and then format the partitions.

The easiest way of doing all of that would be with a Windows 98 or DOS boot disk. Windows 98 gives you a lot of tools to play with, DOS just gives you the bare bones.

Good luck!