Hard Drive Hassle

[Derfud]

Recently I got a new 120 GB hard drive as a gift from X-mas. This hard drive would act as a slave in addition to my current 40 GB HDD. So I install it, set it up all properly, and boot my computer. To my confusion, the drive wasnt showing up in My Computer. After some thought, I realized I needed to format it to NTFS. The only way I knew how to do this was to pop in my winXP CD, and format it in the windows install, the only problem is, I didnt want a second copy of winXP installed on my second hard drive. I only want to have one OS. So I go ahead and format the drive, but when it starts to try and install winXP I try to stop the installation by restarting the computer. But the installing keeps trying to start, no matter what I did. Until finally I realise, now that the hard drive shows up in my computer, I can format it through windows, and everything will be peachy, right? Wrong, I boot up in safemode, then let it go and format, when it's done, I go to inspect the contents of the hard drive, and to my amazement, the windows files are still there. Forgot to mention this was after I had tried to fix the problem of the second installation with no files trying to start an operating system, so I figured If I actually installed windows in the full, it could just as easily remove it.


Well, anyways, what I am trying to do here is completely reformat my hard drive without having to go through the windows setup process. Any help provided would be greatly appreciated.

[Smaug]

Go to your control panel and open up administrative tools, then go to computer management. From there click on disk management, then you should see your drive there, right click and chose either format or partition depending on what you need to do.

[Derfud]

Thanks, that seemed to remove the XP files, but now when I try to start my computer, It still thinks there are 2 OSs, the exact same way it did after I stopped the installation by restarting. If it helps, I get this error when I try to start the non-exsistant OS:

Windows could start because the following is either missing or corrupt:
<Windows root> \system32\hal.dll
Please re-install a copy of the file above

It's strange that all the files are gone, yet the computer still thinks that I have another operating system. I wonder if this has something to do with my bios. Does anyone think removing the battrey, then replacing it might reset something like this? Input would be appreciated.

[Daleon]

You still have an entry for it in the boot.ini. This gets hosed up everytime windows installs and it leaves its footprint around forever. You can look in your C: root and make sure hidden files is turned on. Open boot.ini with notepad and edit out the line for the OS thats not there anymore, make sure the default is your good one. You can change the timer, but I think once there is only 1 entry and its the default it will shoot right to it.

[Derfud]

When you say "C: root" I am assuming this means the WINNT folder. But everywhere I look in there, I can not find it. I do have it set so I can view hidden files, but I can not find this boot.ini file you speak of.

[Smaug]

go to start then run and type in msconfig and then click the boot.ini tab

[Derfud]

Smaug! Thank you, that fixed it! I am very greatful :D Thanks for everyone else who helped me with this :D

[Smaug]

np man glad it worked out for you :)

[Daleon]

That works to, but for future ref Derfund, the root is not the windows directory. Its the first directory on the harddrive, not a folder. So on the C drive its just C:\.