i need help in doing a clean install of windows 2000. now i have windows 2000 installed on my computer, what i would like to do is format the c drive and do a clean reinstall of win 2000. i have knowledge about the other version of windows - win 98 "the steps would be to make a boot disk and reboot with the disk and format c and setup. is it the same procedure for win 2000 from where you would make a boot disk and the procedure for formating the drive c and then the setup. could someone help me about the procedure. thanks for the help

Actually...no. Win 2k and XP [contain the new core components ..."COM+"] and above does not use the DOS 7 formating utility of those found in Win ME....in sense, the core components [COM+] "build" these items as they are set during the installation. Such as the "emergency repair" utility; the clean install of Win 2k can only be initiated by running the setup once more. The new COM+ objects create an image [boot image] containing the NTkernel. The boot sector of your windows has been replaced with this image [ntkernel, ntdetect, bootlog, ntrdl....]. Unlike ?Windows.exe, the booting is initiated by COM+..ntrdl. ***IF YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY INSTALLED WIN 2K, DO NOT FORMAT YOUR HARD DRIVE. FAT32 CAN NOT REMOVE THE IMAGE...YOU WILL ULTIMATELY DESTROY THE LOW LEVEL FORMAT. FIRST BACK UP YOUR FILES{ DON'T USE THE WINDOWS BACKUP IF YOUR USING A HARD DRIVE AS THE PRIMARY IDE CIRCUIT}; FDISK AND REMOVE THE NON DOS PARTITION [NT IMAGE]; RE-INSTALL ?WINDOWS AND THEN DO A CLEAN INSTALL OF WINDOWS 2K. IF THIS HAS HAPPENED, USE A FORMATING UTILITY SUCH AS MAXBLAST OR POWERMAX TO RESTORE THE LOW LEVEL FORMAT...ONLY FOR NEWER MAXTOR AND QUANTUM DRIVES... BE ADVISED, DOING A CLEAN INSTALL OF WINDOWS 2K WILL PREVENT YOU FROM INSTALLING *ANY PROGRAMS* THAT IS NOT WINDOWS 2K VERIFIED.

I'm not sure what you're talking about but if he want to format his hard drive and reinstall Windows 2000, he can most certainly do it. I would recommend booting with the CD and doing any formatting and partitioning during the install. The install procedure will give you those options so you do not have to format and partition the drive prior to the install. And I even did this without using my CAPS key.

If you have w2k already installed is that in an NTFS partition? If it is you can do: Fdisk /mbr fdisk and remove the none DOS partition Repartition yor drive. You can install from the CD it'll take care of that for yo. The install disks could be created (on 4 formatted floppies) by using the makeboot.exe in the makeboot directory of the CD.

its actually simple doing that with win2k, u need to boot up from the win2k cd by changing the boot sequence in the bios so that the first boot device is cdrom, setup would start from win2k cd and during the first phase of installation you'd get options to configure how you want ur partitions to be formatted, either ntfs or fat32. To conclude, u do not any floppies to bootup and start win2k installation.

you can also use this debug script to wipe your drive absolutely clean.... debug -F 200 L1000 0 -A CS:100 xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301 xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200 xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1 xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80 (Type 80 for the main hard drive - hd 0, or type 81 for the second hard drive - hd 1) xxxx:010C INT 13 xxxx:010E INT 20 xxxx:0110 -G