My 2 Grandsons have managed to infest their computer having visited most of the undesirable places on the net and also with no firewall nor things like AVG . I managed to remove with spybot, adaware more than 200nasties though things like LOP resist my tools. I thought the best thing then would be at the command line format c: /s.... No, not possible Boot floppy doesn't get recognized: The windows XPpro installation disk, gets to about half way through the installation before announcing that the PC has either a bad HD or a virus. (Confirms my worst fears) Therefore I looked for XP dos, non -existent! My own computer has no A drive, so I've been combing the "howtos" looking for format C: from a CD. There must be thousands of comments on this subject, but between following links to places that no longer exist an reading others advice.... I'm not getting anywhere. Could someone please give a set of steps to achieve the following:- How do I a) make a bootable CD b) Have the needed dos snippet to execute the DOS that may be needed. C) reformat their hard disk from this CD? In other words I think I'm asking how do I do a clean boot??? Help Bye and thanks Fred

>> Therefore I looked for XP dos, non -existent!<< ... and you will never find one becasue no such thing exists. DOS is a single user 16 bit command line based operating system Windows XP is a multi user 32 bit GUI based operating system. Boot from the Windows XP CD. Delete all existing partitions and recreate new ones. Don't just format the existing partitions. If you still get an error saying there is a virus then the Master Boot Record is infected. The only way you can get rid of that is to use something like kill-disk which writes all zeros to the hard disk deleting everything. http://www.killdisk.com/ Stuart

Thank you Stuart for your time. Yes, I see there is no dos in the winXP pro. My fault for not stressing that I really need to ***format*** the c: drive 88GB. ... or even more basic. How do I from a CD execute format c: /s when I have no dos ? Bye Fred

"How do I from a CD execute format c: /s when I have no dos ? " You don't, FredF. As Stuart said, boot the XP CD and start the install. The XP install program will give you the option of partitioning and formatting the drive before doing the install.