Hi all, Could somebody please tell me how you reformat Windows XP, ie. completely wipe the hard drive clean of everything when you're using WinXP. I've tried eveything (well, not EVERYTHING, otherwise I wouldn't be here) and the old dos 'format c:/' don't work, when I boot to dos using the dos disk it can't find the hard drive, only the floppy drive, so any help would be very much appreciated. While I'm here, how do you get rid of or permenantly disable the windows messanger thing that keep demanding I update it eveytime I get online. I've had enough! Thanks all....or few........tez

If it is the "messenger" that comes from two wonderful companies that offer you a thirty dollar solution. All you have to do is disable messenger by doing the following start>settings>control panel>adminstrative tools>services>scroll down and right click "messenger" select properties and disable it. I use the classic view for my control settings, so the mname might be different in the other control panel view like services or something. Steve Gibson also has a program called "shoot the messenger" that will disable it at http:www/grc.com/

To format select new instalation and do the format as part of your XP installation(do the full, not quick).

As I understand it, you can boot from the WinXP CD where you can remove or delete the partition, re-partition, format and reinstall. As to the second item, Windows Messenger can be stopped or disabled by running services.msc from Start > Run, type in services.msc, click OK. Scroll down to Messenger, right-click and select disable. Hope it helps. Ron

OK, two things here...... You prob cant format the C drive cos it's formatted in NTFS. Run fdisk from the A:> prompt and first check ur partition (option 4 I think) to confirm it's ntfs, then 'Delete non-dos partition'. Now u can either create a new partition using fdisk, restart and format in FAT32, or boot from the XP disk and let XP handle all the partitioning/formatting. (this will only offer u NTFS tho). Your second Q refers to the MSN Messenger update popup. As this comes from the MSN server, there is no way AFAIK to prevent that. Why not just update to MSN6 - it's much better anyway !! Hope this helps

btw, If u don't use MSN Messenger chat prog, then u can stop the prog from running when starting Windows in Tools/Options. You then won't get the update popup.