Trying to do a clean install of Win XP

afaik, the install program should offer to format the drive you select to install XP on. Should be the step right after when you select the drive, in fact.

Can you restart in DOS? If not then put in a win98 startup disk (be sure to set in BIOS to boot floppy first not CD) then restart

Stick in the XP CD and reboot. You should see a message come up that says 'Press and Key to boot off of CD'. If you don't go into your BIOS, usually DEL, sometimes F2. It will tell you on the screen 'Press Delete to Enter Setup'. Then go to the boot section of your BIOS and make sure that it is set to boot off of the CD first.

Once you boot off of the CD, XP will go through inspecting hardware, ask you to press F8 to agree to the EULA, then take you to the Disk setup screen. You want to delete any partitions that you have, press D, then L to confirm. Then it will bring up the format screen. Select NTFS Quick Format. After a while you will be asked to enter your CD Key, then you will go through the setup process.

The sequence that I always use is this:

• Make sure that all of your hardware has been found and there are no yellow ! in Device Manager. If you do have some !, you will have to go get a driver for that. XP has good driver support so you probably won't have to.
• Then update XP. Install SP1 and then run it through Windows Update to patch everything.
• Then start loading your programs. It is also a good time to see if there are updated versions of them.
• With XP, you have 20 days to activate it. Once you do this, you are home free.

Thanks for all the help. I'll try some of those suggestions. What do you mean by havinging 20 days to activate XP? I don't remember doing that te first time.

I think what confused me is that I only had one partition so I didn't expect that I would need to delete it!

Quote: Originally posted by Megan
Thanks for all the help. I'll try some of those suggestions. What do you mean by havinging 20 days to activate XP? I don't remember doing that te first time.

I think what confused me is that I only had one partition so I didn't expect that I would need to delete it!

Actually I meant to say 30 days to activate the WPA (Windows Product Activation).

As far as deleting the partition, I was thinking that you were still running ME. If that is the case, then you can just do a quick format using NTFS and skip the partition deletion.

For the most part, XP doesn't require to be re-installed as often as 98 did. What kind of 'fussiness' did you have?

My CD burner wasn't working right, it kept spitting out CD's without finishing the burn. But only when burning music, not with data. So that was one problem (not that that was a windows problem... I don't know...). What else? Oh, I had a crash and lost all my bookmarks & favourites (weird - I might have still been using the Opera v. 7 beta so that might explain the problem there). Also a bunch of stuff installed that shouldn't have been there. I hate it when programs leave stuff around and then I forget to remove it all and wind up with junk everywhere. I'm kind of particular about drive organization - should have done a better job in the first place. I somehow ended up with a couple of oddly named folders in root of C: that I wanted gone but didn't know if they were important or not. So, start fresh.

(Yes, I know, it was probably dumb of me to try to solve my problems this way but I didn't know what else to do other than hauling the thing off to a specialist. May still have to if the CD burning doesn't work)

Thanks for all your help - it worked the second time around!