XP DISK FORMATTING 1

[MORDAJ]

If I were to format my hard drive with XP Pro on it, will I be able to restore it with XP Pro?

 

[wolluf]

What do you mean? What are you trying to achieve?

If you format the drive (how are you intending doing this?) - you 'wipe' everything from drive (although a data recovery app will be able to recover stuff from it).

If you then install XP Pro back on drive, old data will all be gone (and by installing new version of XP, much more difficult/impossible to retrieve old data).

If you've accidentally formatted drive and want to recover data - load drive as slave in another machine and run a data recovery app from there. Do not perform any format or write operations to the drive.

 

[MORDAJ]

I am trying to wipe every thing off of my computer and i dont care about the files I will lose. I was wondering how I format the drive and if the XP Pro disc acts as a recovery disc.

 

[MasterofNone]

No, XP doesn't act as a recovery disc.

During install you can delete and format install partitions, so you could boot using the XP disc and do a new install that way.

Only issue being product activation which you might need to sort out with a phonecall to M$

 

[Bobg1]

Before you wipe it out check this faq
faq779-3401
it will save you having to reactivate.

 

[MORDAJ]

Thanks