Formatting drives to reinstall

[xtreemman]

i want to completely format both of my hard drives and reinstall xp, what would be the best way to format my two hard drives and get them ready for the reinstalation?

[jimmalenko]

First assumption: they're physically two different hard drives, and not just two partitions on the same hard drive ?

The reinstallation will only take place on one of the hard drives, and XP's install disc is bootable, so just reboot with it in the drive and change your BIOS to boot from your CD-ROM (if necessary). XP setup will give you the option to remove all existing partitions from the drive you wish to re-install to, and will also reformat this partition before it installs. Once you get everything up and running, then you can just go into My Computer, right-click on your second hard drive and go to Format.

Doing it this way means that any data on the second hard drive will be retained until you reformat it this way, so if there's any data, programs etc. that you need to retain, then store them here and make sure you move them before reformatting.

[Garibaldi]

First assumption: they're physically two different hard drives, and not just two partitions on the same hard drive ?

The reinstallation will only take place on one of the hard drives, and XP's install disc is bootable, so just reboot with it in the drive and change your BIOS to boot from your CD-ROM (if necessary). XP setup will give you the option to remove all existing partitions from the drive you wish to re-install to, and will also reformat this partition before it installs. Once you get everything up and running, then you can just go into My Computer, right-click on your second hard drive and go to Format.

Doing it this way means that any data on the second hard drive will be retained until you reformat it this way, so if there's any data, programs etc. that you need to retain, then store them here and make sure you move them before reformatting.

That's probably the easiest way to do it. If you want to do it without using the XP install cd you could use QTparted, which is like a free version of partition magic. You can find it on the Knoppix live-cd... www.knoppix.net