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A Better FDisk/Format?

Started by Prozak Dec 24, 2004 at 9:29 AM 2 replies 400+ views

Original Post

217

Dec 24, 2004 at 9:29 AM

I'm reinstalling my machine, as it had suffered a meltdown from too much clutter installed eating away at its megahurtz!... My original Windows XP cd used to boot, but i left it in the car this past summer, and as some of you guys might know, here in Portugal this last summer was crazy hot... the cd didnt work after that episode... I now use the XP cd of my laptop, but that doesnt boot. No fear, for I have lived in the pre-history, where knowledge of DOS commands was a daily thing required, right next to gathering food and hunting... [wink] None the less, I find the DOS part of the instalation a bore... I have to delete the old partition (NTFS), create a new one, reboot, format the disk, and all of those steps take AGES, because fdisk validates the drive, and format tries to format the whole drive (why?!)... Isnt there a tool that discards anything the drive might contain, and just overwrittes it with a clean partition, FAT32-ready? (this tool would make the assumption that the drive is healthy, and the user knows what he is doing) After that step I'm ready to install windows...

dave

322

dave

Dec 24, 2004 at 9:31 AM

I'm not sure if this is what u mean but there is a program i use called DelPart.

ace

Avatar God

175

Avatar God

Dec 24, 2004 at 10:56 AM

Wow, it doesn't take me long at all to reinstall Windows (the DOS part, anyways). Maybe 10 minutes, max? I do the quick NTFS format, doesn't take long at all. And deleting/creating partitions takes virtually no time.

Um, that wasn't at all helpful, but no, I'm not sure what would be faster. I think one of the security companies might have something useful for you (Norton).

Toolmaker

216

Toolmaker

Dec 24, 2004 at 11:14 AM

If you can lay your hands on an old version of GDisk you're set. GDisk formats, partitions and unpartitions disks that are formatted in many filesystems.

The new versions are commercial, but I have an old BETA here, which works perfectly(And is supposedly free). Although, I'm not sure what the legals are since it didn't come with a license file.

Google a bit around for gdisk.exe.

Toolmaker

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