Formatting My Vista Drive? Installing and Upgrading Vista Discuss Formatting My Vista Drive? in the Windows Vista forums; If your still booting into Windows just select your drive under "My Computer" right click and choose "Format". It'll format even though your in Windows. ...

[laubin]

If your still booting into Windows just select your drive under "My Computer" right click and choose "Format".

It'll format even though your in Windows. Then re-boot with the install DVD and install Vista.....

If you don't have a working Windows on the HD then find an old floppy with an OS on it and boot from it and use the "Format C: command"

Larry

[Znod]

Wow, out of the blue a star showed up on this thread, and I found this ancient question from felix. So, here goes. Defrag or format? I have defragged all my drives at this point. I did format my Ultimate (second) drive on my new Gateway because because I did a clean install there.

[felix8406]

Like Crabby mentioned "many moons back", you can use the Vista CD to format the hard rive; just use the repair console and choose the prompt command. Type format X: (where X is the drive you want to format). But if you are installing Vista in that particular drive, Vista will format the drive anyway, so there's really no need to format the drive first. Even if you have a previous version of Windows installed, Vista will save the data in a folder, which can be automatically removed by using Disk Cleanup.