Reformat hard drive under XP?

Hi Bob, Great site. I'm trying to reformat a laptop hard drive, but whenever I try to delete the partition on which Windows is installed, it won't let me, due to "Temporary Installation Files." I don't have enough HD space to currently install it on the drive. Now I can't get past the installation screen. Please help!

EDITOR'S NOTE: You forgot to boot from the CD, it seems.

I recently bought a Toshiba Laptop with Windows vista. Its perfromance has been very very slow ever since. I asked the store to dump vista and install XP for me and they would not do it. I have 1 gig of memory with 120 gig hard disk and quite a fat processor about 1.3 GHZ. What could I do to this machine to make it perform faster?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Very slow ever since... what? Since you bought it, or did something happen? More RAM is probably the best bang for the buck.

Hi Bob, Im having problems formating my laptop hard drive so as to reinstall winXP. Have tried to format using the steps above but get the following message- 'The disk may be damaged. Make sure the drive is switched on and properly connected to your computer. If the disk is a SCSI disk, make sure your SCSI devices are properly terminated.' Can you help?

EDITOR'S NOTE: At what point do you get this message? Are you sure you're booting from a CD?

Hi Bob, I'm trying to reformat a hard drive, when I attempt to delete the partition windows is on at the moment it tells me that it contains temporary setup files and the partition can not be deleted. I changed boot order in the BIOS with ATAPI CD-ROM Drive on top and then Hard Drive then Floppy Diskette Drive followed by Network Adaptor at the bottom and selected F10 to save and exit. DO you know how to get around this?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Yes, you must boot from the CD. If you boot from the HD, you will get that error.

Bob, Great sight, and although it did not quite give me the answer I was looking for, it prompted the old grey matter to 'get it'. I was trying to install XP and reformat the drive, but kept getting the message about not being able to due to Setup files. Your site mentions not being able to format the drive XP is on and having not booted from the disk. Suddenly dawned on me that I was using a wireless keyboard and so it was possible that when I pressed 'any key' it was not registering and thus not booting from the disk. Plugged in a wired keyboard and presto. The key thing to notice if you think this might be your error, is that if you boot from the CD you have to click F8 to accept the license agreement and if you don't boot from the CD you click with your mouse to accept the licence agreement.

Hi, I successfully formatted my desktop following the steps provided. However, when I reinstall all the drivers from the CD that came with the computer, I couldn't install the ethernet LAN driver. When I search the hardware, it says that there's no ethernet Lan hardware. Do you know what went wrong?
my computer is an AMD Athlon 64 pro. K8T800 Neo
Ethernet hardware: Realtek 10/100/1000 mbps ethernet lan.
thanks.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I'd look at the Realtek website for new driver software.

Hi Bob, My computer crashed - that wonderful blue screen - and I haven't been able to get back in. I am able to see the contents on my hard drive using a Linux CD and have saved (hopefully) everything I need to. When I boot from the installation CD, it only starts loading files, then goes back to the BSOD. No format, nothing else. Is it me or the CD?
Thanks!!

EDITOR'S NOTE: My guess is a problem on the hard drive. You'll probably need to replace it.

Hi Bob. My computer runs very slow at times. However, when I do a reboot it seems to work very well for a little while. Then it slows again. I have a DSL connnection and I usually don't turn off the modem when I do a reboot. Is my hard drive about to fail? My modem? Should I do a reformat? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

EDITOR'S NOTE: You can try rebooting your DSL modem once in a while. But this may help more: http://askbobrankin.com/make_windows_xp_run_faster.html

Hi Bob,
I have a C: and a D: drive that each had Windows XP on. The C: drive was somewhat corrupt so I tried to Reformat it which did seem to work but now I can not reboot the computer unless I want to re-install XP. What should I do????

EDITOR'S NOTE: It *seemed* to work, but you can't boot up normally? Sounds like the install process may not have completed. I suggest you wipe the disk with a reformat and then install XP.

Thank you. I was having some problems w/ reformatting, multiple partitions and multiple xp os's. Read numerous help pages but they were all wordy, techy, incomplete etc... You laid it out so that I could follow, understand and succeed. Many Thanks