Topic awaiting preservation: Reformatting with a partition

I've gotten a virus or something that's making it impossible to even run IE when I want to (not that I run it often since I use FF). I want to reinstall XP and start over fresh.

I recently partitioned my drives and I'm curious how that will work. Currently I have XP and my programs running on the C: partition with everything else (music, photos, PSDs, etc) on other partitions. My setup is actually one 40G drive that has the XP install and programs on it and another 80G drive with everything else.

When I go to partition will I be prompted as to what drive I want to install on? I don't care about losing my programs, I can just reinstall them. I just don't want to lose the partitions or anything on them.

Probably a stoopid question but I've just never done this before with multiple drives/partitions.

:::11oh1:::

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Cool. The C: drive is a seperate hard drive altogether with only XP and programs on it.

All my files are on the other partitioned HD.

:::11oh1:::

Well if you use a DOS disk to format you can just go format C: and it should format only the C: partition.

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. --Groucho Marx

That last piece of advice could cost you.
DOS does not work with NTFS.
The drive assignments could look screwy and you might end up formatting the wrong partition, say your data partition for example.

Make sure you do a DIR before formatting any partition to ensure it's the one you want to format.

edit: investing in Norton Ghost is worth every penny. although interestingly Ghost can screw up the drive letter assignments too. once you have finished installing, ghost your partition to the other drive and backup to external media.
Then do successive/incremental ghosts as you load applications.

i keep about 4 ghosts on my second drive ranging from pristine OS without apps to fully tweaked OS with all apps. I normally reghost from the second drive every 10-14 months. i also reghost if i feel the system is unstable or that some website tried to hijack my browser.

I keep another 12 on DVDs..each at a different stage of installing apps. It takes about 4 minutes to image and about 4 minutes to restore. you can't beat that.

(Edited by Shooting_Star on 07-24-2004 00:38)

I've used Partition magic to do this recently krets and had no problems at all.
I'm running XP home with two 40 gig HDD. On the faster of the two HDD I made 3 partitions, one just for the operating system, so far things are just dandy.
Feel free to "Q" me if you want to talk some more about it.

:::tao::: ::cell::
[ED] Actually I'm not on ICQ, either msn messenger or Trillian moi [/ED]

(Edited by Tao on 07-24-2004 02:21)

Got er done guys, thanks.

:::11oh1:::

I'm a little late now you're sorted, but I would have recommended Partition Magic too.

Incidentally, I seem to be a having a problem with IE since I installed FF. As soon as IE is open, it closes. No event log, no other symptoms.

I switched off third-party extensions and it works fine like that for IE-only applications (like Windows Update). At least I know where to look now for a solution when I have time to worry about it.