You cannot format a hard drive without destroying (for all practical purposes) all the data on it. I suspect what you want to do is to partition your harddrive into 2 or more partitions with your perfectly honed XP Home on the boot partition. You do not need to format to do that. There are many utilities that will create, remove and change partitions without loss of existing data. If you feel you MUST format, then make a back up copy of what you want to keep or use a utility like Norton GHOST or DISK IMAGE to create an image, save it to CD or DVD Rom, format and partition the drive and then restore to the desired partition. Be sure the partition you restore to is large enough to accept everything that you backed up or imaged. Greetings from the sunny east coast of Central Florida. ----- Original Message ----- From: "ted" <ted_clark@xxxxxxxxxx> To: "PCTECHTALK FREELISTS" <pctechtalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 5:20 AM Subject: -=PCTechTalk=- Re: pctechtalk new question > formating and partitioning with winxp > i am not getting off the ground with this, let alone flying. > please, will one or more techies give a blow by blow rundown on doing this very delicate operation. > in my case, starting with a maker embedded copy of xp home [now honed to perfection for me, therefore to be left undisturbed, > currently in the one and only partition] and two recovery disks, so far pristine and untouched in their original packing, on a > notebook with 20gb hdd. > please don't tell me i don't need to, i already know how stupid i'm being in attempting this. > > cheers ted > > To unsub or change your email settings: > http://www.freelists.org/webpage/pctechtalk > > To access our Archives: > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PCTechTalk/messages/ > http://www.freelists.org/archives/pctechtalk/ > > For more info: > http://www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/list?list_id=pctechtalk > > To unsub or change your email settings: http://www.freelists.org/webpage/pctechtalk To access our Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PCTechTalk/messages/ http://www.freelists.org/archives/pctechtalk/ For more info: http://www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/list?list_id=pctechtalk