I recovered from a bad corruption (for the nth time), but decided to salvage some data & just do a totally fresh install again. It's been 6 or 7 years, & a fresh install is the best way to purge the drive of all the junk it's gradualy aquired.I just wanna ask if theres any steps neccssary to ensure my drive gets wiped during the install, or if theres any step I should take first... I'm not talking about a repair install here, I want as sterile a platform as possible, before I start infecting it all over again.Will my install disc do this automatically, or do I need to learn some DOS commands? 1 person needs an answerI do too

What is the make and model of your PC?Which version of XP do you have?Your XP installation CD is all you need.You need to boot off this CD (consult your PC's documentation). Then there will come a time to reboot to complete the installation. At that point, you must boot off the hard drive instead.If your goal is a Clean Install, you would need to delete all the partitions except the special ones (some PC's hard drives have a diagnostics utility and some even have a recovery partition).You will also need all your hardware drivers. You may already have a CD that has these. Otherwise, they may be downloaded from the PC manufacturer's website.It is crucial you install all the latest XP security patches.Here is a good guide:http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

In addition, the data on the disk clusters will still be there even if the drive is formatted. The only way to remove such is to overwrite the disk clusters. steve <LittleMrJ> wrote in message news:Email removed for privacy...I recovered from a bad corruption (for the nth time), but decided to salvage some data & just do a totally fresh install again. It's been 6 or 7 years, & a fresh install is the best way to purge the drive of all the junk it's gradualy aquired.I just wanna ask if theres any steps neccssary to ensure my drive gets wiped during the install, or if theres any step I should take first... I'm not talking about a repair install here, I want as sterile a platform as possible, before I start infecting it all over again.Will my install disc do this automatically, or do I need to learn some DOS commands?

Thanks... I found this link, a pretty clear step-by-step guide to wiping a drive with or without the install disc. I couldn't, however, format from within windows because it was assuming I had partitions on my drive (which I don't)... Funny, it won't allow the format function untill the partitions are deleted, but if you never had partitions it just hangs there, waiting for you to delete something that never existed, & the format bar is greyed out the entire time... I thought about adding a partition, as to allow this function operate, but the XP install disc is all I need.http://www.ehow.com/how_6026_format-hard-drive.html