Can't Reformat :\

[motox2121]

Hey guys all the sudden i got a virus and havent been able to clean my machine up so i thought i would try to reformat it. The problem is when i boot from my XP disk the virus has made it so it appears i have NO hard drives, and setup quits. Is there any way to manually reformat my drives so i can get rid of this crap?

Thanks alot in advance for any help as i would really like not to have to buy new hard drives.

BTW these are 2 80 gig western digitals in a RAID 0 array

 

[DigitalMP]

If you have a boot floppy you should be able to get into fdisk and delete the partitions, then reformat either in there or on the xp disk.

 

[motox2121]

i dont have a setup disk but i can still get into windows, its just reall laggy and clogged up. Is there a command i can run in prompt to get into FDISK?

Thanks

 

[djnes]

Why would you buy new hard drives? There's nothing wrong with the two you have. I won't even go into all the factual reasons why RAID0 is an over-hyped joke...that can be for another thread.

It sounds like need to load the SATA RAID drivers by hitting F6 at the beginning of the XP setup. Once it loads the drivers, it will show your array, and allow you to format it.

If you can't do this, you can always go into the RAID controller's BIOS utility, break the array and re-create it. If you built this computer, then you already know how to do either of these.

 

[motox2121]

yea i built it its just been a few years.. been out of the computer scene for a little bit but thanks for helping me out

 

[rcolbert]

Sounds like you need to press F6 when the XP setup program is loading and then put in a floppy that has a driver for your RAID controller. The fact that XP setup doesn't detect a hard drive likely doesn't have anything to do with a virus. Also, you don't need fdisk. You can use the XP setup program to delete any existing partitions and recreate them as needed.

 

[ColinR]

break the array and re-create it.

This is the easiest to do. Swapping the position on the IDE cable (if it's an IDE drive) might be enough to do this. Swapping the SATA header they're plugged into might be enough to break a SATA RAID set up. Alternatively, make it a Raid 1 setup, then switch it back to Raid 0. Going either way should destroy all data (considering 160GB doesn't fit into 80GB!).