If all else fails, make it a slave drive & slave it in someone elses comp & get them to format it that way.


Chris:burn:

Don't forget to put all your drivers back in after you get the monster running. All of your accessories and things need their little drivers to keep you happy. Also, you could have saved your self a lot of trouble by using something like Norton System works to clean up and unfragment your HD and a couple of spyware and adware software to seek out all those little gremlins.

Norton System works? LOL...

Just done a job for a company who used this, especially the roll back app included which has completely trashed one machine, the hard disk isn't accessible even when slaved in another machine...

MDB,

Thanks matey, but I have Adaware, AVG, Spybot, StopZilla, Sygate and McAfee Spamkiller.

I'm sure this is just a buildup of cr@p that never gets erased when you uninstall programs.

Hmmm,
Never really had a problem with Norton works on several computers for over ten years. Course there are other things out there as I did not specifically recommend Norton. But for the average joe something that can take care of routine housekeeping duties may be called for instead of finally going for a complete reinstall, usually with a lot of headaches and inoperative accessories. I hear this kind of story all the time from people with less IT knowledge than me and this just leads me to believe that for the masses, a program like Norton Sys Works can help avoid the problems that started this post.

Every 12 months or so I'll just wipe the hard drive and start again, as long as you back up everything you need there isn’t a problem and it doesn’t really take that long to set everything up again on a home PC.

Wow! That is really overkill. Keeps out the nasties though.

SP if you're doing that once a year, why not create a ghost image, it would take less than 30 mins to perform a full rebuild, OS, apps, data, all configuration done?

Yes totally agree, just haven’t got round to getting the software any suggestions?

I think the actual ghost app is only a couple of meg.... you could probably download it for "trial" purposes from most P2P networks