Right, that's it. I've finally had enough. Please can somebody help me with this. After having my computer for a while and cluttering it up with a billion different programs and getting infected with a whole load of pop-up programs advertising penis enlargements etc I decided that it needed cleaning. However no matter what I deleted I couldn't get the pop-ups to go away or find out how to delete some of the programs that were running in the background apparently making my system faster (yeah right). Anyway I decided that the only way to do it was to purchase a second hard drive, copy across what I wanted to keep and then format the first hard drive. However I can't find a way of formatting the first hard drive as my computer won't boot up off the second one as it apparently doesn't have the boot sector or something. There was also some sort of message about ntldrv or something. Anyway after weeks of frustration and having finally screwed up everything on my entire computer so that nothing works anymore I just want someone to tell me how to format the entire thing and I'll start again from scratch. Alternatively does anybody know how to stop pop-ups. I have downloaded around 20 programs that all claim to do it but none of them work and just sit running and using memory whilst being useless.

You can delete the partitions on your old HDD from within XP setup. I just use the Google toolbar for pop-up blocking. It works fine unless you've had adware installed on your machine in drive-by fashion. I like to install AdAware and Spybot S&D--AdAware to get rid of adware, and Spybot's immunization function to keep new adware from installing. If you want a self-extracting diskette image that will wipe everything from your old drive, let me know.

1.Get a boot disk 2.Check your BIOS and make sure that the first boot device is Floppy. 3.Put boot disk in and reboot 4.At command prompt, type "a:\format c:" 5.Wait until its done 6.When finished, put Windows 2000 cd in CD-ROM and go to bios set first boot device to CD-ROM 7.Reboot and Install Abit IS7 Motherboard Pentium 4C 2.6ghz @ 215 FSB(2.8ghz) CoolerMaster Aero 4 Copper HSF eVGA GeForce FX 5900 SE Thermaltake Giant II VGA Cooler

To include another great program along with post 1, spyware blaster is a great program too. (I hate when you get penis pop-ups) When all else fails beat the $%!* out of it!!!

I've tried AdAware and Spybot and neither of them work, but yes, some of the popups were put onto my machine by me downloading music software (never again). Didn't understand the bit about self-extracting disk image, could you explain further please. I have already tried the boot disk method and it won't let me format the hard drive. This is when it says something about a ntl.drv file being used even if I haven't booted into Windows.

Just set your bios to boot up on CD rom, and put your XP disc in. follow the instructions from there. Don't use a bootup disk in floppy drive. If you get lost repost When all else fails, beat the %*#$! out of it!!!

Sorry to be a pain but I've also tried the XP disc solution. It won't let me do a clean install and only offers me the option of installing extra options. I know that all of these methods have worked in the past on different computers that I have had, and can't figure out why they won't work now.