Bloodwinter Clan

Why's it have to be such a pain in the ass to format a drive?

Before you could just load up dos, format, and you were done.

Now you have to boot from cd, but what happens when it won't boot from the cd and just loads the fucked up version of windows you just spent 2 hours trying to salvage. This salvage attempt of course screwed up when XP installation for some reason decided it couldn't 'see' half the files on the cd.(What the fickity hell?).

So you load up 98 on your second physical drive only to recall 98 doesn't recognize NTFS (Well fuck me.)

Alas you are able to run the cd from 98 and you choose to install XP on the other drive, but after an hour of installing you can't boot from that HD again(What the hell is NTLDS, or I think that's what that said wasn't present).

So you boot from the old HD with 98 on it again and it allows you to choose XP on your main drive... (oh yea someone mentioned that if you are running on one HD and install on another, xp puts the boot files on the HD you are running on... weee)

But you don't want to have to choose XP every time you turn your pc in(98 is only there for when XP implodes)

So you try and boot from cd again... some how the cd doesn't have the boot files(assuming the NTLDS or whatever they're called are the boot files, but how the hell does that happen)

You bang your head against the nearest barbed wire fence... and try and load up the cd one more time... Bill Gates laughs as he sips his warm cup of blood and it boots!

Morale of the story, I miss dos.

As a note, yes I had switched bios to boot from cd when I was trying to boot from cd... I'm not an idiot. I even went and bought a new cd-rom because a) i could use a regular cd rom to back up my dvd/cd writer and b) maybe it was screwed up

Turns out it wasn't screwed up because I ended up installing it off the drive anyway!

rightclick > format drive, it's not hard

Except when you want to format the drive you're running XP on.

its ok will. admit defeat. you are not as big a computer geek as you previously thought.

Nah screw that... I got it up and running didn't I?

I was just describing the most round about fucked up way I had to go about doing it. It shoulda been as simple as: Pop in XP cd, switch bios to boot from cd, either repair install or fresh install, format, etc. Not brain surgery.

So what's the computer geek's answer?

delete the partition, create a new partition
XP will format it with NTFS.

Usually the only file errors I get with XP or 2000 installs is after the drive is formatted and it begins copying files.

The only problems I've ever really had with the file issue was with a cheap amd system with an msi motherboard (I swapped everything except the chip and the motherboard... would not install 2000)...

and my machine, when I tried to slipstream a windows xp cd with sp1, using the intel sata raid driver. worked fine with the original cd though.

I would have tried:
Boot from a dos diskette and wipe the XP drive or just delete a few /windows folders to make XP of C: unrunnable, then boot from CD & install onto C:

BTW, you can turn off that OS selection display, or at least limit it down to 5 seconds or so. At work right now but I think it is right click my computer/properties, dig in there somewhere. I set all of mine to 5 seconds.

Linux > Unix > MS

Funny, after working for years on Linux, I always thought when I started working on AIX or HPUX or Solaris it would be so much nicer. Now after years of doing both, Linux is so much easier to work with. It actually feels like more of a finished product than any of the Unix's. Although Linux doesn't have the "running man", and if any of you have run smit in AIX you should get a nice chuckle now.

Heh Josh I was going to try a dos disk but I didn't have one on hand and unfortunately you need the 98 CD to make one with '98, and I turned my room upside down looking for that damn thing.

And as for deleting files in windows to make it unrunnable... I'm not THAT familiar with windows to know what would make it unbootable versus bootable but just frozen when it boots so that I'm stuck with a nice frozen desktop as a computer.

I'm an AIX boy. I like how the running man holds his hands high in celebration when complete

No, the best is when the command fails and he falls flat on his face. I laughed for at least 20 minutes after seeing that. Guy I work with was showing me what all smit could do, and I chuckled at the running man. He said "yeah and when it fails he falls over". I was laughing thinking he was joking, but sure enough...SPLAT.

I really would like to use another OS but there isn't anything out there that can run everything Windows can is there? Compatibility is just a huge issue for me, specially on a gaming system.

Or maybe I'm wrong and there is one out there, besides Mac

This thread is officially over.. move to tech board.

did you go into the bios and set it to boot from CD first?

I knew some smartass would come in and make that comment, but I didn't think it'd be you Kitkat... read my post, I made a note at the end that yes I went into bios and told it to boot from CD...

Way to be a board Nazi D.