I just want to reformat! Help!

[aya9877]

Alright, I am completely willing to just reformat my XP Pro machine (or rather my mother's machine). I just can't even get it to do that! Background:

Mom gave me her computer months and months ago wanting me to fix it. Unfortunately now I can't remember the specifics of what the problem was. I worked on it for a few days and gave up. lol. In any event, I thought it may be a motherboard issue, so I bought another (used) CPU thinking I would swap the drive from my mothers into this 'new' machine. No such luck.

Essentially, as soon as you try and boot up the drive, it goes to the screen that says windows did not shut down properly, would you like to boot in safe mode, safe mode with networking, etc.

If i try any of the safe modes, it always gets hung up at the mup.sys file. If I try last known good configuration or starting windows normally it just freezes.

I have tried changing the boot order in the bios to boot from the CD, but it just brings me back to this screen.

Essentially, I can't get it to boot in safe mode, can't get it to boot from disk, can't get to the recovery console, can't get to a dos prompt. Is there any hope?

Thanks in advance

 

[Spike]

can you boot from MSs XP setup boot floppies?

 

[Samstoned]

the fast way to format
use the install disc and erase the drive partition
then follow instructions on install new OS
reformat don't use fast format
xp or what ever you are loading will finish after the format
don't do anything on 2nd reboot

slower way dwnld a good 0 fill app. make bootable disc for it and 0 fill the drive
go back and reformat

 

[Spike]

... I can't get it to boot in safe mode, can't get it to boot from disk, can't get to the recovery console...

I don't think it's that easy in this case Samstoned

That is, unless you can press f10/11 during post for boot options and explicitly tell it to boot from CD that way.

 

[aya9877]

So simple

So I am hitting myself in the head. Not sure why I didn't think to try and make the boot up disks on floppy. I made the 6 disks and changed my boot order. So far it seems to be working just fine. I'll update one way or another. Thanks for all the prompt replies!

 

[aya9877]

Sure enough, that worked just fine. Now I just have to figure out how to install a 56k modem. I know. I know. Ancient, but moms doesn't use the internet often and paying for high speed just doesn't make sense for her. I should rephrase, I know how to install an internal modem card, but the machine has a bracket in the way which I can't figure out how to remove. Eh, I'll save that for another day.

Thanks for your help.