Unable to Reformat Hard Drive with Windows XP

Last night I spent several hours trying unsuccessful to do a 100% clean install of Windows XP on our home PC. Earlier in the week I had run a few programs to clean up spyware and other garbage that had accumulated over the past year or so. The end result was a PC that refused to access the Internet. Frustrated, I decided that the best solution was to back up our data, wipe the hard drive, and start over.

I have an original Windows XP Pro CD, along with the CD key, so I figured no problems. Wrong. As far as I can tell, if all you have is Windows XP, it is impossible to reformat your hard drive. You can use the setup program to do a clean install of c:\windows, but it leaves the rest of the drive untouched. That would be fine if the OS and all config info was in that one folder, but its not. Documents and Setting as well as Program Files both contain system info. While there are a lot of cases where you would want to maintain this info when you reinstall the OS, it is not unreasonable to expect a user to want to wipe everything out and start with a entirely clean slate.

Some of what I learned:

* You can't create a startup floppy in XP. You can create a DOS boot disk, but it doesn't have the required fdisk or format utilities on it.

* Contrary to infomation published on Microsoft's site, setup does not give you an option to reformat your drive before installing the OS. It will only overwrite your main Windows folder.

* The setup program will not let you delete the main partition, claiming that it needs that partition to host temp files. (I tried, unsuccessfully, to get my PC to boot off the setup CD. That was probably due to a quirk in my system's BIOS and not the setup CD.

* The Recovery console isn't helpful either. Diskpart also refuses to delete the main partition. Format (format c: /fs:ntfs) pretends to format the c drive, but it lies. No effect.

* Microsoft has a utility that creates a set of setup floppies for XP, but all these do it bring the machine to the point where it can go to the setup cd. No reformatting utils available there either.

I needed the PC to be functional for today, so at around midnight I settled with the new OS install, resintalled Office, and restored our documents. An hour later, I was done.

Although the new install seems ok, I do still want to wipe the drive entirely. A few things I want to try: (1) configure the BIOS so that the CD drive is first in the chain of boot drives (I kept the floppy in the #1 spot, which may have been my problem), and failing that (2) try to get my hands on a Windows 2000 start-up disk, which I believe has the required utilities, (3) purchase disk utility software that will do what I want.