Formatting troubles (1 Viewer)

[CrashOveride]

I reboot the machine and chuck in a DOS boot disk (which tells me it's a windows millenium emergency boot disk) and so I casually go format c: /u
It does it's job and everything looks like it's normal.

Swithcing to C: (in the dos mode) and using the 'dir' command yields that all the data is gone.

However, I can still boot normally into windows and none of the stuff on C: is gone. What is gone is a few files I had on the D: partition.

I'm using WINXP.

help?

 

[sunny]

Is your WinXP partition NTFS? If it is, that would explain...

WinME cannot directly read NTFS partitions, so when you used a WinME boot disk it does not know the WinXP partition is there. The C: you formatted was not the WinXP partition, but was the first partition that WinME could read, which happened to be some FAT partition in your computer.

You should just format WinXP using the WinXP CD, which should be bootable.

 

[Enoch]

stick in ur XP install cd and goto bios and set ur first device to the cd rom
and then wen ur comp starts it will run off cd.
then ull be able to delete partions and format ur comp

 

[CrashOveride]

You were spot on Sunny with the NTFS partition.

For some reason my WINXP cd wouldn't boot so I had to install win98 then upgrade to winXP...i think maybe my XP cd was the upgrade version (not the self installation one).