format

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Limerick
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i had to format my harddrive due to a virus and have tried to wits end when reinstalling xp to partition my drive with a primary dos partition, to no avail. i either have a partition as another drive or xp is installed with fat32 file system. if anyone can help it would be appreciated. (dell tried):(

Hi jman1980,

Welcome to VirtualDr! This is a great place to hang out... to learn from others... and to offer help along the way.

It will help those who want to help you if you could be a little more descriptive as to what is going wrong. If I'm understanding correctly, if you create a partition on your hard drive, it is obviously going to have a different drive letter. (Or do you mean that you are not able to get the drive all into a single partition by using fdisk? How large is the hard drive in question?

The times that I have installed XP Pro, it has given me a choice as to whether I wanted it to use FAT32 or NTFS.

Happy Computing!

Limerick
https://discussions.virtualdr.com/

If you're using XP Setup to format the drive as FAT32 then it won't work on drives larger than 32Gb. You can either format as NTFS or use a Win98 bootdisk and use fdisk to format the drive. You can get one here:

www.bootdisk.com

limerick,
didnt mean to offend, just very frustrated. anyway, the root question is this, does xp require a primary dos partition to function properly? when my machine was delivered, it had a fat32 partition and the main body of the drive was ntfs. after running a debug script, then running fdisk and installing a primary dos partition, then moving to install the os, which is xp home edition. when installing xp just hitting "enter" to install, it later gives you the choice of install fat32,(this is highlighted by default i assume) ntfs, or ntfs quick. when anything other fat32 is selected, xp formats the disk as ntfs and the primary dos partition gets deleted, or at least is does not show up on any "pictures" of the disk generated by my defrag program (o&o profesional). the other odd thing that the picture show is like 10 gigs of "reserved for mft" empty blocks. my drive is 80 gigs by the way, if you can offer any help i would appreciate it.

limerick,
didnt mean to offend, just very frustrated. anyway, the root question is this, does xp require a primary dos partition to function properly? when my machine was delivered, it had a fat32 partition and the main body of the drive was ntfs. after running a debug script, then running fdisk and installing a primary dos partition, then moving to install the os, which is xp home edition. when installing xp just hitting "enter" to install, it later gives you the choice of install fat32,(this is highlighted by default i assume) ntfs, or ntfs quick. when anything other fat32 is selected, xp formats the disk as ntfs and the primary dos partition gets deleted, or at least is does not show up on any "pictures" of the disk generated by my defrag program (o&o profesional). the other odd thing that the picture show is like 10 gigs of "reserved for mft" empty blocks. my drive is 80 gigs by the way, if you can offer any help i would appreciate it.

XP does not require a primary dos partition to install unless you are dual booting.

what i would do is boot the XP home cd, delete all partitions with the partitioning app inside XP when you boot it and then recreate a partition continue on formating that new partition type NTFS (full) not quick format.
then install XP home...