HeadChange

How to format and reinstall Windows XP

Is your com­puter slow­ing down? Have you tried all the anti-virus and spy­ware scans around? Have you defrag­mented your hard drive? If you’ve answered yes to those ques­tions, it’s prob­a­bly a good idea to start over with your com­puter. By that, I mean for­mat and rein­stall Windows.

Before doing any­thing, you’re going to want to back up an impor­tant files that you have on the com­puter. Remem­ber, for­mat means erase every­thing!

You’re also going to need to make sure you have a Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem disk some­where. Nor­mally, when you buy a com­puter, you will get a few CD’s with it. One is usu­ally a recov­ery tool and the other is usu­ally an oper­at­ing sys­tem disk.

Once you have your files backed up, put the Win­dows CD into your CD or DVD drive and restart the com­puter. When it begins to start up, you need to pay atten­tion to the BIOS screen, it’s the screen that says Dell or IBM, what­ever kind of com­puter you have. Either on top or bot­tom of the screen, it should have some text. Most com­put­ers are dif­fer­ent, so you’ll have to find the key that needs to be pressed for the Boot Menu. Usu­ally it’s F8 of F11.

It’s going to feel like you are being wel­comed in DOS. Once you’re in the boot menu, select boot from CD-ROM. This will bring you into the Win­dows installer pro­gram. It will take a few moments to ini­tial­ize and load. The first thing you’re going to want to do is delete all the exist­ing par­ti­tions (it should be the first step with XP, but it may be dif­fer­ent with other ver­sions. Par­ti­tions are vir­tual dri­ves that sep­a­rate a phys­i­cal drive.

To for­mat the drive. High­light your C: drive and press D, then con­firm. Now there shouldn’t be any par­ti­tions in the list. Press C to cre­ate a new one, then press enter to install Win­dows on your new par­ti­tion. You’ll want to for­mat it as NTSF when prompted. That’s about it, in 30 min­utes or so, you’ll be done and Win­dows will be installed.

In the future, if you want to be able to avoid hav­ing to back every­thing up, cre­ate another par­ti­tion while you’re still in the par­ti­tion man­ager. Make it half or 3/4 the size of the C: drive. When Win­dows is installed, you’ll need to go to My Com­puter, then right click on the new drive (not C:) and for­mat as NTSF.

This way, you can put all you pho­tos, music and what not into this drive so that next time you need to rein­stall Win­dows, you won’t have to back any­thing up!