I bought a PC from a friend for my Dad. I'm having trouble with a few things and need help...?

Question

I bought the computer from my friend for my dad who has yet to discover the internet. I want to completely wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows XP, NP just format the drive through command prompt or delete the partitions from disk management. Well there is a problem it has 2 hard drives one is a 40gb primary and the other is a 5gb backup both have windows XP installed on them. So basically 2 OS's on two hard drives in one tower. I want to completely clean both but anytime I try to do the things above it always gives me some reason why I can't format or delete. I can only boot and get into XP on the 5gb hard drive. I'm stuck and I don't know what to do now. I want to wipe both hard drives and reinstall XP fresh? Anybody know what I can do?

Answer 1

Darik's Boot and Nuke wipes all data from any hard drive it can detect. I hope you know what you are doing.

http://www.dban.org/

Answer 2

I want to congratulate you on your purchase and sharing the internet with your Dad.The internet can be fun and a source of information on repairs,manuals,product reviews and overall entertaining.My first question would be do you have the original start up disks? If you do then this possibly could make it easier. It is my understanding with two hard drives they have to be designated master & slave or as I prefer primary & secondary. I am assuming the 5GB hard drive is the primary due to it booting up first. Windows XP OS will not let you delete or format the operating system in order to protect it's operational ability.It would be better to insert Start up disks in floppy power down accordingly by the OS, reboot while repeatedlyly pressing the F8 key(on start up). This should bring you to the instructional screen to repair or rebuild your drive.It will inform you that you may have to select your operational system by moving the arrow key up or down. Once you selected right OS. Hit return. Upon completion of this it may inform if you wish to continue all data will be lost. If you continue anything on that drive is gone.A word of advice, if you do not have original start up disks to reinstall you could lock yourself out of your computer by destroying the operational Windows XP system & if you can't replace it. The computer won't boot up. Can you ask the seller to help you through this?Under the guise or pretext that it would protect there privacy. If not. Locally here, retail store such as Cicuit City offers a Fire Dog service to check your computer to see what is wrong with it.Maybe you simply can repair the hard drives. If you want to eliminate other files that are not linked to the windows you should be able to delete them.Trust this, if you start deleting files, this can have dire consequences on the functionality of your machine. Like locking up or flat quit working. I would imagine there would be a charge to reinstall windows though. I would seek at least a guide to walk you through this.If your Dad is not computer literate it is hard enough to learn but to learn on a malfunctioning computer would cause catastrophic frustration. Tell pop If that old fat guy can do it with a little help so can you.Thanks for being considerate to your Dad.Us old guys need all the help we can get.Good Luck & God Bless.

Answer 3

take second drive out the 5 is not even worth keeping h**l windows alon takes up double that so ya one 40 drive is good for now even then u wont need that much  so i would pull it need help just email me