How do i fdisk on win xp?

[Addijhaq]

OKay, i wanna know the best and most painless way to fdisk or reformat my hd with win xp. I have 2 hds and if i fdisk or reformat the bootable drive will i lose all of my stuff on the other storage drive?

[Yawgm0th]

If you reformat the drive that you boot from, you won't lose everything on the other drive, but you won't be able to boot to XP from your hard drive. :) I'm not quite sure I understand what you're trying to do. Are you going to reinstall Windows XP? In that case, if you reformat the drive your putting XP on but you'll lose everything on that drive. In addidtion, any programs that require the registry (pretty much anything that comes with an installer) on your other drive might not work even after a reintsall of XP but everything will still be there. In any case you can't format the drive Windows XP is on from XP (XP won't let you, for obvious reasons), you will have to boot from something like your XP CD and reformat with that (or use a boot floppy with fdisk on it, any other Windows OS, whatever). If you just want to reformat your 2nd hard drive (that xp isn't on) that should be easy enough through fdisk or though Disk Management (go to control panel, administrative tools).

[Plysthone]

You can also give Partition Magic a try. Go here and have a look.

http://www.powerquest.com

I had 3 partions on my 40 G. When I bought a 120 G I repartioned the 40 G into one partition and it worked great, except that I run NTFS and it had a few errors so I had to boot from the emergnecy disks and correct the errors there before it would let me expand the first partion to the whole 40 G.

[minibubba]

partition magic is a great program but it's too bloody expensive for my tastes (but I am an opensource & freeware junky afterall ;) ). IMO it's only worth it if you find yourslef managing partitions on a very regualar baisis.

Addijhaq, just what is it that you want to do? do you want to completely erase the partitons and start from scratch or just reformat the current C:\ drive?

I'd only recommend using fdisk if you are going to scrub the entire hdd. If not, just do a full (not quick) format when you go to install WinXP. No matter what you do however, you will still be able to access your second hdd once you reinstall winXP (or some other ntfs supporting OS).

The most painless way to do all this is to just boot off the CD and format the system partition. If you also want to repartition however, there is no easy or difficult way to do it with fdisk, only one real way to do it.

but before i get into fdisk, are you even familar and comfortable with fdisk?