Having trouble trying to format my C: Im on a laptop which doesnt have a floppy drive. Its a Dell Inspiron 1100 with Win XP. Normally I would just insert the start-up floppy upon boot, then use command promt Format C:/ in dos, but my trouble is that I cant get to dos upon boot-up. Tried putting the winxp cd in the D: drive, but its is not set up to boot off D: on startup (and I dont know how to change that =P ). Tried holding down CTRL, F2, F12, and DEL...still no DOS, instead I just get brought to OS system menu's. Any tips in helping to rid my C: of all its crap is much appreciated! =)

Thank alot,

-Nick-

What you need to do is change the bios setup of your computer to boot your d drive first. In order to do this when booting up the standard requirement is to press the delete button (or repeated efforts if your impatient like me). When your into the bios setup, if my memory serves correctly you'll need to go into advanced bios features and change the first boot to your cd rom followed by the hard drive as second.

Now when you load up and xp is inserted into the drive, it will ask you to press a button to confirm loading, which you should and it will go into the whole setup area. If you are wanting to format then you don't want to repair the xp installation. You want to get to the point where it allows you to "delete" the windows c drive installation and the next step will ask you whether you want to format the drive in FAT 32 or NTFS. Go for NTFS especially if you've got a large drive and do the full long one as well just for safe keeping.

I realise this is a bit vague, but it is a while since I've had to format my drive (touch wood) and I am assuming your wanting to put XP back on it straight after. Otherwise, we'll have to give you another technique.

Rob

Yeah, it'd be best to find out how to alter your boot-up sequence, so that you can boot from a CD. Because if you do somehow manage to wipe your C: drive, how will you manage to run the Windows installer of the CD?
GF