How do i format my windows hard drive?

Question

i have 3 sections on my hard drive (c),(f),(g). windows is in (c), i store music and photos in the others. my computer is infected with alot of virus, spyware, etc.. and i cannot get rid of them, tried everything anti virus ,anti spyware, you name it, all of the virus etc, are located in windows (c) drive. so i am now going to format it , but how?do i left click it and press format or do i put in windows xp cd and reinstall , if i do reinstall do or will i lose every thing on my other hard drives(f),and (g). or will i get a option when i reinstall saying that i can choose to format what ever hard drive i want. i really dont know what to do any more my computer wouldn't work right. please help.thanks!

Answer 1

You will need to put the CD in and reinstall xp.

You will get an option to only reformat the C: drive.

So you will not loose the other files.

But be sure to run a good virus scanner over your other drives, or you might reinfect the computer again.

You could also download a Knoppix live CD.

With this, you can boot the computer from the CD and scan the whole Harddrive without having to run XP. Maybe this could fix the problem without having to reinstall xp.

Answer 2

Put the cd and reinstall when asked for the drive choose c:\ and format it with NTFS.

After installing windows do not go directly go to the other drives

Install a nice Antivirus and check for viruses.

Answer 3

yes u can format ur c drive alone while reinstalling xp..u will loose all data in c.. Data recovery software can recover any important files..

Next time install kaspersky antivirus right after xp installation..

Hope u know hw 2 install xp..else just email me [e-mail]

Answer 4

simple...

you need a bootable windows cd and if you dont have any creat it.

then just start your PC with cd and try to install win again. in process time it ask you to format any drive or not and you just say yes on C drive and so on...

good luck  

Answer 5

Hi, ok you could try something. Insert the Windows CD and then restart your PC. When the computer is booting up, it should tell you 'press any key to boot from cd' and you can just press Enter. From there you can start the Windows XP wizard. At a certain point you will be presented with the different sections that your hard drive has. From there you can select the C partition and you can delete it and also make a new partition. Hope this was useful and you wont find any difficulty.

Answer 6

Rob, after all the stuff you've done, I'm not convinced you have a virus.  If you detailed some of the symptoms, there might be other alternatives.

What makes you think you still have a virus???