formatting the hard drive

Hello NELPASA,

Do you really know what are you going to do? Your OS is working and occupied your hard drive c:. Just hit ctrl-alt-del to look up how much processes besides clocks are working in system. Since disk C is formatted you'll lose all your stored files.

If you're really sure that you need to format C drive for instance for Windows reinstalling, you could download your PC from setup DVD and installation wizard will offer you to make your disk partitioned then formatted. There're software utilities which could format your disk. I would suggest you to back up your files(those which you would consider as valuable) using any memory sticks,DVD/CD, additional hard drive.

I would suggest you do not rush.

During our last hurricane a tree branch fell and broke my DSL cable connection. Since then I have replaced the sound card ( which is part of the motherboard ) with an external sound card and my USB are not working ( the printer is not recognized).

I took the PC to a shop and they showed me (using a gadget which they attached to the port) that the USB ports are not working, .

So before I buy a new PC, I want to reformat the HD "to see if I get lucky and the malfuntions go away"

I backed up of my files already

By hitting ctrl-alt-del, do I go to where it shows which programs are running or do I have to do some extra steps?

Well my friend... reinstalling windows will not solve a hardware problem. Sometimes it does not solve software problems also, because you're again using ...windows...

hehehe

You can try. Pickup a CD or DVD with the installation files, initialize by the removable media and follow the instructions in the screen. You're gonna be prompted if you'd like to rearrange partitions, format disk. etc. Good luck. After some years, I realized that I got too old to these things... you'll have hours of fun!

Hurricane? You may have a computer that have received a discharge in the motherboard. Years ago what happened was to burn our dial-up modem boards.

Thanks

tree branch fell and broke my DSL cable connection. Since then I have replaced the sound card ( which is part of the motherboard ) with an external sound card and my USB are not working ( the printer is not recognized).

It seems that nearly everyone here has missed the point. OP doesn't need an ISO Image of his system, he needs a BIOS check.

First off, as some have noted, re-formatting your HD and reinstalling all of your programs will probably not solve your problem, as stated above.

Your problem is probably related to the hurricane, broken tree branch, lost DSL connection and so on.

You say you "replaced the sound card which is part of the motherboard with an external sound card". I believe what you are meaning to say is that you installed a slot-mounted sound card (PCI or ISA) to replace the on-board sound subsystem.

This could be one of your problems. Usually, if you override the on-board sound chip by installing a slotted card, you need to enter the BIOS setup at system startup and disable the onboard sound. You may have done this, but you did not say so. Without disabling the onboard sound, there may be an interrupt conflict that has not only bollixed up your sound, but also done something to the USB ports (to which the printer you claim is not working is probably hooked.)

First off, I'd turn off the system and pull the new sound card out. Then, restart and enter the BIOS at startup and press whatever function key is necessary to "restore factory defaults" or whatever it is. Then let the system boot up. See if your USB ports come back on line. If they do, this points to a conflict between your new sound card and your USB ports. Shut down, restart, go back in to the BIOS, and DISABLE the ON-Board sound. Let the system reboot, and see if your USB ports are still good. If they are, shut down once again, and install your new sound card. If the USB port is lost when you disable the on-board sound, then you have a conflict with your sound card and the USB ports. You need to determine which interrupt your sound card uses, because it's probably the same one your USB ports do - you need to switch your sound card to a different interrupt, probably with a small jumper.

Most modern hardware does all this stuff automatically now, but if you have anything that's a couple or three years old, it may not. In the old days (1990s...lol) you had to set all your expansion devices so that a precious DOS interrupt was not claimed by two devices..If your mouse and your modem both tried to use IRQ 7, you'd be hosed.

It's been a few years since I had the need to fiddle with add-on cards, interrupt jumpers and all that, but it sounds like your problem is primarily CONFIGURATION, not a bad hard drive.

Thanks

I'm not sure but I thought that one made a system disk, then boot your computer with that in the drive, then use fdisk to format?

Regards JD.

Thanks

If it is in XP put in the install disc and then restart your computer. While it is booting up repeatedly tap F8 till you see options to reinstall windows which will reformat the disc. There is a lot of ways to format but that is the easiest.

Steve

Thanks

Have you used the device manager/hardware manager feature to check the status of the USB devices? You may just have a problem with the drivers.

I checked it, shows that all of them are working properly

It might be so. Regardless windows gets USB device as properly installed one does not work as had been damaged physically.

I would suggest you to buy USB PCI Host controller card. It's quite affordable. Some $10-15.

On a clean system, go to the link below. Download the disk image file (*.iso). Burn the image file on to a blank cd. If your system will boot from cd, pop the cd you burned into your cd player and reboot the system. You will get a full blown GUI with utilities.

If I may be so bold as to inquire, why do you want to do this?

If you have further problems, just write us.

God bless you, you've got some slogging to do.

The Ultimate Boot CD for XP

/Ari (Orpheuse)

Orpheuse,

I love the UBCD4Win, and use it often, but I don't think they have a burnable .iso file on the site. You have to "build" the ISO file yourself, using your own XP CD. They would have some issues with Microsoft if they were allowing downloads of a ready-to-use ISO file, because of the Windows XP components that are associated with the CD build.

Another bootable CD option uses Linux as the core, and as such, it's OK to provide a full .iso image of a bootable CD. One such project is:

System Rescue CD

After you download the .ISO file from here, you can burn it to CD, and have a bootable system disk suitable for troubleshooting and repair of a "sick" system.

Of course, none of this is probably going to do much good for a user who is trying to format the hard drive of a system, using the OS that is installed on that system

If the original poster has a "system restore" CD that came with his system, he should try that.

Tom

Hi Tom,

"I love the UBCD4Win, and use it often, but I don't think they have a burnable .iso file on the site. You have to "build" the ISO file yourself, using your own XP CD. They would have some issues with Microsoft if they were allowing downloads of a ready-to-use ISO file, because of the Windows XP components that are associated with the CD build."

Apparently they worked their way around that problem by telling you which 2 files it needs, where to find them on your drive, and how to burn the *.iso.

I definitely will check out System Rescue. I would have gone for the system repair/rescue/reset disk also, those are usually associated with laptops and, besides, I was under the impression that our friend didn't have one.

There is so much information missing from this ticket, like which make and model of the system, which O.S., is the drive SATA, or SCSI or RAID, in which case the format process is a little different. You see, there are too many variables. All we know is that he wants to format and the drive he wants to format is his primary, "C" drive.

That's why I recommended UBCD. UBCD has worked on every desktop system I've tested it on.

Thanks, muchly for the utility. I'm going over there now to get it.

Very good post, though.

Your buddy,

/Ari (Orpheuse)

Thanks

You have recieved a lot of good advice on how to reformat your hard drive, but I believe your original question was not answered. ctrl-alt del will bring up the task manager and it will show you all the processes being used. Unfortunately the process being used is windows.

You have to boot off another drive (CD or floppy) and use the utilities the other posts have mentioned. You must have a boot CD or boot floppy with fdisk or something like BartPE which has a nice gui. You can also download the latest Ubuntu which has the ability to run completely from the CD. I'll often do this when checking out a system with no operating system installed yet to see if the hardware is working. If I were you, I would download and boot from the Ubuntu Live CD. It has built in USB drivers so if the hardware is not broken, they will work. You can use gparted to format and partition the drive at that time.

Thanks a lot for your advise. I will try it later.

Regads

No system affords suicide.

The Drive/ Patition on which system is installed cannot be formatted while the system [windows or any other ].

Boot through a boot-disk/ floppy to format it.

Regards

Thanks. I do not understand why I am having trouble formatting. I have done it twice within the last five years by going to my computer and right hand clicking on the drive and selecting format. Somehow the system was changed

Haajee,

I like your description of the Original Posters attempt

No system affords suicide.

Tom

You're some mistaken. Unix/Linux allows everything from shell/command line if you're logged in as a root :).

Regards & thanks

If you want to totally reformat your hard drive so as to reload your OS, or upgrade to another OS then do the following.

Get onto WWW.majorgeeks.com , acquire program suite called Killdisk (freeware for single pass), this can be then be loaded onto a floppy disk using its (Killdisk) setup proceedure.

Now reboot your computer with the Killdisk floppy, it has its own Linux boot kernel.

Start the Killdisk program and follow the prompts. Note Killdisk is quite a brutal but effective program for clearing hard drives. Once started it can't be stopped or your data recovered afterwards.

It will leave you with a single blank partition which can then be formatted/partitioned how you please. Windows creates a "secret" partition which may/will give you grief if you try to reload your OS. Killdisk sorts that problem. Depending on how big your drive is will determin the length of the process to clear your drive.

I use Killdisk to prepare any of the drives I have to reuse in setting up computers at work it saves me a lot of agravation.

It sounds like you have a motherboard hardware problem, probably time to update to last years model. I recently bought two higher performance motherboards (2.8Ghz &3.0Ghz)with processors and ram on ebay for A$130, so its not that dear to do.

As your already committed to fiddling around you may as well do it properly.

Cheers

Pez

Thanks

Thanks

Run dos command shell that usually ignores windows processes