Format disk without installing Windows?

Question

It has come to my attention (through experience) that the WinXP installation disk is quite buggy and can occasionaly destroy your partition and drive structure completely.
This is my experience: I had C,D and E partitions and wanted to reinstall WinXP to C (as one must do every few months). The installation program messed up my drive by unpartitioning one parition and repartitioning the other two in a total of 1 TB disk, while the disk is only 500GB in size. After paying money to data retrieval specialist wizards who managed to retrieve the lost data I have been informed that they recieve numerous cases each month, all linked to this buggy software.
So I was thinking of formating the drive the alternative way and only letting the WinXP installation disk install the OS.
How can this be done (the easiest way please, since I am not an expert). I was thinking Linux LiveCD, but I don't know if they support NTFS formatting.

Answer 1

Yes, The Linux GParted Live CD supports NTFS. If its only the partitioning that is buggy then you won't need to format with GParted anyway as you can just make the partitions and go from there ;)

Answer 2

I always use a live Linux CD to format my new and used hard drives.



I started using a Live CD as an easy way to test newly assembled computers or to test computers that are running slow with a virus infected or malware clogged windows operating system... I always use a live CD for this formatting & partion adjustment...



I have always let windows reformat the partition when installing... but I do not use windows to do the partitioning.



I use a 32 or 64-bit Mepis7 Linux as it has amazing hardware recognition. I start mepis in the vesa boot configuration, third option down on the live cd boot menu. This makes it easy and does not require a second try if the computer has a video card installed, or integrated video that does not boot correctly.



Parted-Magic-3.0 is a live CD with lots of options including gparted...

Answer 3

i think the bug is you. you are doing something wrong with out realising



for a start a partition is not the hard drive

and xp does not format



so just read the instructions as you install it

delete partition is just that, it will delete C partition for exmple, not the whole hard drive.



creat partition is just that, it will create C partition and you tell it how big.



if it wipes out the other partitions its because you didnt limit it.