Reformating with Vista: HP CD?

[ViktorHark]

I recently got Vista: Home Premium, and I was loving it.

Previously, I was running a XP system, off of a 500GB HDD

For some reason, why I chose a "clean" install, all Vista did was partition the remaining space (something like 138GB) and left the remaining space untouched. Needless to say I was annoyed.

Is there any way I can reformat my HDD completely with, say the Vista CD? I'd rather do it now and get my full HDD space, than wait and have to reinstall more and more apps after I finally get around to doing it.

Is there anything else I can do to reformat the drive if the Vista CD is unable to reformat?

[Drexl]

Well, I think it does that by default to protect against people formatting their full drives and losing data.

There should be options there to delete the existing partitions and to format a new one.

[ViktorHark]

I went through the install process again, and I was never prompted if I wanted to reformat or not.

[Drexl]

Hmmm, maybe it's different with HP's version. Do you have an XP CD? There's got to be some free utility that creates a boot CD to format a hard drive.

[MajorDomo]

Go to the manufacturer's site that produced the HDD and look under download applications or tools. There should be a download to reformat the entire HDD. I usually do a low level format and start out fresh. Check the HDD website for information.