i need advice on formatting a HD

[ubamous3]

1 of my friend's computer has been acting up real badly possibly due to virus and malwares,etc..
1/ it's on winxp pro and has office 2003
2/ it has 2 partitions with the important data on D partition

i'm trying to format it clean and install win2k pro instead of winxp pro but will still use office 2003

i have already backed up all the data on D as well as the files in the c:\documents and settings folder, program files folder, and windows folder to another HD within the LAN

now, i have partition magic version 8; but i have never formatted a disk which is the primary disk before, so i'm a little cautious, plus, it's going from xp to 2000 so i dont know if there s anything i need to consider before i hit the format button in partition magic

please advise.

Thanks

also, if i format c, what will happen to the D partition? will all the data there still be intact even tho the OS will be different? i have already backed them up but i'm just curious

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another question, i have a fat32 HD (not the bootable drive) and i want to convert it to ntfs, what r the steps in partition magic? can i just convert it while leaving the data on the disk there or should i move all the data out of the HD first and then convert and move back the data?

 

[FortiTude]

make sure that you didn't encrypt any files with the windows file encryption as win2k cant read it when it's encrypted with winxp. they use little different ntfs versions but except the file encryption it is all the same and win2k can read it
there shouldnt be any other problems

it's saver to backup the data of the fat32 partition first then reformat with ntfs and copy it back ... several forum users (including me) got problems when converting fat32 to ntfs

forti

 

[ubamous3]

thanks fortitude for responding,

no i didnt encrypt the files so that should be ok; already formatted and installing win2k right now; at first, it wouldnt format and really freaked me out but i used partion magic 8 and got it formatted; hopefully, the install will go smoothly

about backing up data on the FAT32 HD before converting it, it's a wise decision and i figure it's the pref way to go, but since it's kinda big, i was hoping that the risk of losing data is minimal if i convert while having the data there

 

[Sorondil]

Just a tidbit of information; the best and safest way to use Partition Magic 8 is to boot off of the cd and use it in DOS mode.