Step by step guide to reformating?

[Spider]

Can anyone that knows what their doing give me a guide on how to do it?

I'm having some small problems with my dear dear computer, aka slow downs etc. I think I need to reformat so can anyone help me with a practicly complete guide?

I have windows XP home ed. and hmmm... if you need more info tell me.

[Rbstr]

boot it into dos mode and type help and it says there.
I havent done one in a while, google has all the answeres i would think

[Cyanide]

I'm just listing this off the top of my head. You may have to read what's on the screen and use some logic to figure it out if I'm not too specific.

Put the Windows CD into the drive.
Turn off your computer.
Turn on the computer and go into the bios (usually accessed by pressing Delete or F1 during boot up).
Navigate through your bios and set the CD drive containing the windows CD to the first boot device.
Save and exit from the bios to continue booting.
The computer will boot from the XP cd.
Once it's booted to the CD, you want to delete the existing partition, create a new partition, and then format it using the NTFS file system (I don't think the XP CD gives you a choice of any other file system actually, which is good). Use the quick format if you don't want it to check for bad spots on the hard drive.
Once you're done formating it will ask to restart the computer (i think), when it boots up again, read the on-screen instructions to install windows. Once windows is installed, go back into your bios and change the hard drive back to the first boot device.

Basiclly, once you've booted to the CD you should be able to read the on screen instructions and get the job done. It's pretty simple.

[Ait'al]

If your reformating and not worrying about whats on your comp or arent reformating form your harddrive why dont you just use type format and use the windows format.exe?

Did they stop auto setting it to check cd and/or floppy drives???? :confused:

[GreyFox]

I always reformat through the windows installer.