Formatting my hard drive

[Padded Mouse]

I have a new laptop and have copied all relevant stuff from my old laptop to my new one. The old one is going to be given to my niece, but I want to format it the harddrive

How easy would it be for me a layman to format my hard drive and if easy enough can someone give me the steps?

Problem

I am running windows vista , but do not have any disks for this as it was installed by my ex. I do however have my windows xp disks still, so when I format, I want to install windows xp.

Would be grateful for any advice anyone can give me?

 

[Pada]

Hi,

When you start the Windows XP setup, you can format the drive before installing it on the hard drive.
That would definitely be the easiest way to proceed.

I would actually recommend that you split the hard drive in 2 partitions, so that she can keep her data on the 1 partition so that she can format/reinstall Windows without losing any data.
I usually make my Windows XP partition 20GB. Once you've installed Windows, move the My Documents, My Pictures, My Videos & My Music folders to the D Drive

 

[Padded Mouse]

Thanks so much for that info

 

[PsyWulf]

Also just be careful if you are installing XP from a non Service Pack disk you may have driver issues when trying to pick up your Laptop drive if it's a SATA disk

 

[Pada]

Well, if the HDD is a SATA drive, then you won't be able to even format the drive, since Windows XP setup disk won't even be able to detect it.
So if you have a SATA drive, you would most likely have to build a custom Windows XP installation disk using nLite, which includes the SATA drivers. << This certainly won't be that easy.

 

[bdt]

I have a new laptop and have copied all relevant stuff from my old laptop to my new one. The old one is going to be given to my niece, but I want to format it the harddrive

How easy would it be for me a layman to format my hard drive and if easy enough can someone give me the steps?

As easy as burning the Darik's Boot and Nuke ISO to CD, booting from it and ..well.. nuking it!

 

[ponder]

Well, if the HDD is a SATA drive, then you won't be able to even format the drive, since Windows XP setup disk won't even be able to detect it.
So if you have a SATA drive, you would most likely have to build a custom Windows XP installation disk using nLite, which includes the SATA drivers. << This certainly won't be that easy.

If you are going to use nLite just slipstream the service packs into the XP media as the later service packs provide SATA support.

 

[Pada]

Ah, I didn't know that.

I've always had to manually include my Gigabyte KT600 motherboard's SATA drivers on my WinXP SP2 disk.

 

[ponder]

Ah, I didn't know that.

I've always had to manually include my Gigabyte KT600 motherboard's SATA drivers on my WinXP SP2 disk.

Weird, my XP SP2 disk has never had issues with sata controllers but then again I don't recall ever owning a board with a VIA chipset like your KT600 so it could be related to VIA I suspect.