[manzoor]

hey bought a new hdd 160gb, the technician stupid installed discwizard, i thought there would be no need for partitioning but when installing xp i got stuck

i get this error when starting the pc

STARTING ONTRACK
Seagate Technology // some logos here
DDO v9.56a



Press spacebar to boot from diskette

Error: Dynamic Drive Overlay not loaded
Insert boot disk in Drive A: press spacebar when ready



ok so first i dont have a floppy drive, now i want to remove this discwizard shit and partition it

but how do i remove this discwizard ????

oh and is there really a need for a floppy drive cant a cd or usb perform its tasks ? like creating a boot cd, ?

how to create a bootdisk with cd , so that it contains partition manager

and which partition manager should one use gparted ?cutepartition manager ?

able to create delete, resize partitions for llinux and windows ?

what i want is to completely wipe put all the things on my hdd and then partition it and install windows

This post has been edited by manzoor: 27 May 2008 - 11:23 AM

[Nomel]

manzoor, on 27 May, 2008 - 09:42 AM, said:

what i want is to completely wipe put all the things on my hdd and then partition it and install windows

Well, all you really need is you windows xp cd.

Here's a little guide..

1. Save all your data (if any) from you hard disk.
2. Put your xp cd in the drive, go into BIOS and make the cd drive the first boot device. Restart
3. Boot from cd, let the boot thingy load all the drivers and stuff.
4. When you get to the Welcome to Setup screen, press enter (first option) to set up win xp. You probably have to agree to license and so on.
5. On the next screen it will tell you somthing like: "To delete the selected partition press (somebutton, I have seen either b or d). you will have to confirm that 1 or 2 times by pressing a certain button. Do that.
6. Now you can create as many partitions as you want (I believe by pressing c). When you have all the partitions you want select the one you want to install xp on and press enter to install it.
7. On the next screen it will ask you what type of formatting you want to perform. Choose "quick" ntfs format.
8. Let the computer reboot, (don't boot from the disk again) and let windows do it's installation and follow any promts that will come up.
9. After the istallation, when everything is set up, reboot again, go into the BIOS and change the order of booting devices so that you hdd is on top.

This is the way I always do the formatting, partitioning and installing os. (although I never use partitions).

Hope this helps.
good luck

[manzoor]

thats what i did
but after the formating and copying the windows files, then it reboots so thats the step where im stuck in after restart it gives me the same error and doesnt continues to complete the installation


i think that cleaning out the whole hdd would solve the problem not formatting/partitioning but wiping all the data would solve it
but how do you do that

and after that can i finely create partitions in the windows setup ?????

This post has been edited by manzoor: 27 May 2008 - 12:16 PM

[Nomel]

Hmm usually when you delete the partitions and format, you hdd is pretty much wiped out.
You could try to connect it as a second harddrive and format it under windows from another harddrive.
Also, I would disable the floppy drive in your BIOS if you don't have one..

[manzoor]

ya floppy drive is i think disabled because at first it asked me for floppy drive but now i have disabled the floppy drive from the floppy configuration in bios so i think that might disable the floppy drive

and so if it repartitioning and formating wipes out the hdd why theres the disc wizard still showing up ?

[Nomel]

Well, i googled discwizard a little bit and it looks like you need the disc that you used to install discwizard in order to remove it (and the dynamic drive overlay thingy)

take a look at this
http://www.neowin.ne...hp/t134267.html
and this
http://www.seagate.c....02.28.03.18:34

I don't really know much about discwizard in fact, i never even heard of it, but from what I have read you should have acces to some sort of maintanance for the discwizard ( probably with the cd).

I read that one to completely wipe out your hdd is to install linux on the hard drive withouh partitioning and stuff, then remove it again, install windows and use the regular format instead of quick format.

This post has been edited by Nomel: 27 May 2008 - 12:55 PM

[manzoor]

thanks nomel but that still didnt solved the problem

in the neowin forums, they say that you require the bootdisk from which you installed the ddo to uninstall it


please help me with this ddo thing
how do i set it up ? if i could delete all this how would i ?

This post has been edited by manzoor: 28 May 2008 - 01:46 AM

[.Maleficus.]

If you want to wipe everything (and I mean EVERYTHING), use DBAN.

[baavgai]

Link for DBAN is buggered, should be: http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Indeed, if you just want to blast the HD, any number of LiveCDs should do the trick. You may have other issues to be aware of:

If your computer is reasonably new, it's possible your XP disk doesn't know how to deal with the hardware. As you've noted, it will call for a floppy and most major manufacturer's don't include the things anymore. You may be able to format with the thing with windows on the first 30GB or so. If you're not adverse to that, then you can format the rest of the disk once you've patched your windows enough that it understands the hardware.

Good luck.

[manzoor]

baavgai is the DBAN same like the Window Washer's system erase bootdisk ?

[baavgai]

manzoor, on 28 May, 2008 - 05:02 PM, said:

baavgai is the DBAN same like the Window Washer's system erase bootdisk ?

If you're talking about this Window Washer, the intent of it seems to be cleaning out cruft from a functional windows system. The intent of DBAN says it all, "Boot and Nuke".

To be clear, this is the classic "format c:". You're trying to completely erase the hard disk, start fresh, clean install. If that's not the intent, erasing everything might be a bad idea.

[no2pencil]

manzoor, on 28 May, 2008 - 05:02 PM, said:

baavgai is the DBAN same like the Window Washer's system erase bootdisk ?

DBAN is DoD standard disk cleaning software. It will do more than just erase the data. It ensures that it's not recoverable.

[manzoor]

oh thanks everyone dBAN solved it

but im curious why doesnt gparted, fdisk didn't do the job thanks anyways

and yeah Windows Washer does the same thing too, It contains a tool called System Erase which does the saame thing i think

This post has been edited by manzoor: 29 May 2008 - 11:15 AM