reformating one of my split drives

good day geeksters, was wondering if i could get some tekkie advice please
i am running win xp home on 80 gigs split into 2 40's
all my important stuff is on the other drive
now the first drives' acting up - it takes forever just to open up my docs folder
i would like to know how i go about reformatting (i want to do this as it's the only solution in this case) the first drive and leaving the second one untouched - i could take it down to the shop but that'll set me back 35 bucks and i can't spare the dough. thanks in advance folks. cheers.

 

Hello Tam, welcome to Major Geeks.

Take care - I don't think you mean reformat so lets gather some information before you take a very drastic step.

Partitioning like this has many benefits. I presume you mean your DATA is on the good partition?

So what is on the failing one? In particular where is Windows?

I suspect you mean cleanup and defragment.

Studio T

 

You should be able to do a Repair with your Windows XP disk. I would start with a disk check and a system file check first.

 

thanks for the speedy replies stud and bug
the problematic drive is the C drive - that's where windows is
drive D is where all my precious data is
i will try sorting it out with my win xp disc
and see how it goes from there i guess...
thanks again chaps

 

Make sure you have the drivers ready for after reloading Windows. If necessary copy the drivers folder to the data drive.

If your copy of Windows is old enough not to have SP1/SP2 then I recommend downloading Autopatcher to your data drive or Cd. This is the most reliable way to get all the windows updates back.


http://www.majorgeeks.com/AutoPatcher_XP_Full_d4901.html

Studio T