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i have a new harddrive a WD EIDE 160gb. i partitioned the drive with the wd setup disk but when i start the pc with the system restore disk windows xp it reformats it again and since i dont have the service packs on these disk it wont work with a 160gb drive it says its to big i have a restore disk for my other pc a win xp media and it works fine it has the service packs but its only good for 30 days thank you bill ... i cant get to the os to install the service packs ... any help would be great ..thanks

Hi rbh124, welcome to the PCHF.

When you try formatting with Windows XP setup, what are you trying to format as? FAT32 or NTFS?

I've successfully formatted a 500gb hd with a windows xp restore disk using NTFS.

i tryed it as a fat 32 with the WD support disk i will see if it lets me do it as a NTFS with the WD support disk other wise is there a way i can format it while the win xp restore disk is installing or is there some way to get windows xp sp1 or 2 on there because i can only get to a blue screen with my errors which i dont remember at this time. if there can i reformat it through the bios or can u even do that .. as you c iam pretty new at this thank you for any help

Hi rbg, you should be asked when you boot up off the cd itself, whether you want it to be fat32 or ntfs. After it copies the initial setup files it should ask you.

i tryed it all over again partitioned in ntfs but its an older xp restore disk it does not have xp service pack 1 it just repartitions it it self every time it does not give me an option my other xp restore disk for other pc works fine it has win xp service pack 1 and 2 but its only good for 30 days so it seems my only option i can think of is to restore every 30 days or get a new copy of windows with sp1 or a new hard drive one which does not require sp1 to start up neither of which i want to do so any ideas? oh well its to bad either way thanks all for your help