Reinstall XP Home - Write 1's to Disk

[RLHofer]

Short story:

I want to reinstall XP Home Edition. During a previous reinstall, Gateway had me do something like "write all 1's to disk" to make sure no corrupt code was still lurking about. Now they won't talk me through the process again because my system is actually working(though impaired). Can someone tell me how to do the "write all 1's to disk" and then tell me what order to load up the other CD's? Gateway provides a red "Drivers" CD, a blue "XP OS" CD, a yellow "Applications" CD and MS Office CD's. Thanks for any help in advance.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Write all 1's to a disk is a very tedious way of cleaning up a (used) disk. It will be faster to format the harddisk using either the Windows format, or the likes of Partition Magic.

In your case, make backups of whatever you need. Then start from scratch.
1) blue XP-disk. If it asks, let it (re-)format the disk/partition where you install XP.
2)red driver disk.
3)yellow
4)MS Office

All CD's are using Autorun, so should come up with a menu, telling you what to do.