Reformating hard drive

[rgsccr]

I need to reformat the HD on my wife's PC (I think). It was running a version of XP which got corrupted, and it is necessary for her to run a Windows based operatiing system for her master's program. My daughter's boyfriend installed Knoppix on her machine so she could retrieve information that she needed. However, to make the machine useful again we need to install a new XP Pro we purchased, and it seems to be requiring us to remove the prior verson. Since all the necessary data is off the hard drive, the software vendor suggested we reformat the drive but, as computer illiterates, we have no idea how to do this. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thaniks.

[Harry Kuhman]

I strongly suggest that you do not reformat the hard drive with Knoppix or any other form of Linux. If you are installing XP you will likely want NTFS partitions, and such partitions created by Linux (if you even manage to do that) are not to be trusted.

The XP install disk should be able to completely remove all existing partitions and reformat the drive for you. I suggest trying that first. If there are some strange problems with this (not completely out of the question with Microsoft), then you might consider deleting the existing partitions with Knoppix, or with some other formatting software (I like Ranish (http://www.ranish.com/part/), which you could run from DOS). But in any case don't create the new partition or partitions this way, do that with the XP install disk.