Booting to Windows Setup, Formatting, etc.

First let’s talk about boot sequences. I would imagine that most of you have your BIOS set to boot from the hard drive first as this yields the fastest bootup times. Therefore, you’ll first need to adjust your boot sequence in BIOS to load off the CDROM first, then to FLOPPY, then to Hard Drive or RAID. Once this is done, start your computer with the Windows XP CD (Home or Pro) in your optical drive and when you are prompted, press any button to boot off your Windows XP CD. You will then be prompted to “Press F6 if you need to install a 3rd Party SCSI or RAID driver.” Follow the directions to install your SCSI or RAID device and have the floppy available to load the drivers for it. After loading them, make sure you specify that there are no additional devices to load and continue with the setup process.

You will then get to the Windows XP Setup screen. From the Windows XP (Pro or Home) setup screen press Enter to continue to the Windows XP Licensing Agreement screen or if you are unsure about something you can press F3 to exit the setup process. Once you are finished reading the End-User Agreement, press F8 to continue. The next page in the process will allow you, if you have a corrupted or damaged operating system, to repair the problem. Since we are installing Windows XP from scratch, choose the option “To continue to install a fresh copy of Windows XP, press ESC.”

Now you are at the point where you will be essentially creating a fixed disk to store your operating system.
If you are formatting an older drive for use with Windows XP:
-Press “D” to delete the current partition
-The press “Enter” to let setup know that you understand that you are attempting to delete a system partition with an operating system on it.
-From here you will be prompted once more that all data will be lost. Press “L” to delete all data from this partition. Continue to next step for format information.

If your Hard Drive is empty or you just deleted your partition:
-Press “C” to create a partition in the unpartitioned space.
-Then set the size of your partition. The maximum and minimum allowable sizes are shown. Set the size to the maximum allowable, then press “Enter”.
-Back to the partition screen we see that a partition has been created as Drive “C:”. Press “Enter” to get to the format screen.

The format screen gives us the opportunity to choose which file system Windows XP will utilize. Our options are Fat32 (Windows 9x native, short for File Allocation Table 32 bit) or NTFS (Windows NT, 2000, and XP native). Since Windows XP is native to NTFS (New Technology File System), choose “Format the partition using the NTFS File System”. Once you press “Enter” WinXP setup will format your Hard Drive using NTFS. Once that finishes, the setup resumes by loading all of the setup files to a temp directory on your hard drive to begin the setup process.