Hard drive wipe out....

how can I wipe out my hard drive without logging on to the computer...

I'm running windows XP professional

wipe out? I presume you mean format...

Get your installation disk, and when it boots up, either go into repair mode or install and then just format the harddrive partitions as you see fit.

ohh... ok... I'll try that

thanks... :D

Either that or get a win98 floppy boot disk and use the format program.

However, Ober, I was under the impression that since he probably is using NTFS, that you could not format a partition into NTFS via the Win98 boot disk?

You can't. But it would wipe the drive. And I personally trust that method over the WinXP format portion of the WinXP setup. But that's just me.

But you are right. You'd have to format it again with the setup utility.

Also, keep in mind that WinXP does not HAVE to be formatted to NTFS. It's a good idea, but not absolutely necessary.

if you want to COMPLETELY erase everything, get a linux which boots from a floppy or cdrom and use

prompt>dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hda

which makes /dev/hda == 0