Boots disk to farmateing

Irly fusked upp my comp.. when trying to formate and reinstal XP on a comp with an instaled but inactive vista on.. and trust me, i have tryd everything to formate it.. But since its a lattop its hard to huck it upp on an otehr comp and formate it that way..

Dose anyone know a free and ok program that wacly can formate my hard disk from a boot disk how how? so later can instal XP

 

Be aware that if you format a drive on a machine that came with Vista pre-installed from the factory, you will probably have a hard time finding XP drivers for some of the hardware. If you delete any/all existing partitions on that drive, you may also be "killing" any "Factory Restore" partitions, in which case you may have to purchase Vista Install Media (DVD) from the manufacturer. Warranty does not cover "killing" the O/S.

 

Dan has some good points, especially the part about the PC not having XP drivers if it was shipped with Vista. I have seen MANY people format and install XP in favor of Vista, only to discover that there are no drivers available for XP for that particular PC, and they end up having to install Vista again. So before you completely wipe the hard drive, go online and search for the drivers you'll need, download them and burn them to a CD BEFORE you wipe out Vista. Anyway, there's plenty of bootable tools for wiping a hard drive. You can also just boot to the Windows XP install CD and use the delete partition and format options. Or use one of these:
Dariks Boot-And-Nuke http://www.majorgeeks.com/Dariks_Boot_and_Nuke_d4596.html (this is for a floppy disk; a CD version is available here http://dban.sourceforge.net/)
Hitachi Hard Drive Utility http://www.majorgeeks.com/IBM_-_Hitachi_Drive_Fitness_Test_d2828.html (works with all brands of hard drives, not only Hitachi/IBM. Use the Disk Tools > Wipe Drive option)
Super FDisk http://www.majorgeeks.com/Super_Fdisk_d4985.html (this is for a floppy disk; CD version available here http://www.ptdd.com/)
Partiton Logic http://www.majorgeeks.com/Partition_Logic_d4780.html (ISO image for bootable CD)
and there's plenty of others in the Drive Utilities section here at Major Geeks http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads8.html

I hope this helps! Good luck!

[dlb]
:major