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paulWTAMU
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Can't reformat in windows 7?

Mon May 28, 2012 11:00 am

This is really odd. I was trying to help a friend reformat his old laptop so he could give it to his grandparents as a low end PC for web browsing and emailing. Everytime we try to reformat--in safe mode, diagnostic mode or regular mode--it tells us that the disc is busy and cannot reformat . Google wasn't much help--I found a lot of stuff about reformating with multiple partitions but nothing seemed really applicable since there's only one partition on his hard drive, only one OS installed, etc.

we tried just booting from disc but it won't do that; I get a very strange message when I try (I didn't think to write it down).
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Re: Can't reformat in windows 7?

Mon May 28, 2012 11:06 am

You cant reformat from within Windows. I am assuming that you are trying to do a clean install in which case you will have to boot from the CD or create a bootable USB drive to load windows.

The reason you are getting a disk busy is you are trying to format over the files that you are currently using to run windows.
 
paulWTAMU
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Re: Can't reformat in windows 7?

Mon May 28, 2012 4:15 pm

Yeah but we haven't been able to boot from CD; we hit F10 to set boot priority and get a seemingly random message (something about int/windows/something something something)
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Re: Can't reformat in windows 7?

Mon May 28, 2012 4:27 pm

paulWTAMU wrote:
Yeah but we haven't been able to boot from CD; we hit F10 to set boot priority and get a seemingly random message (something about int/windows/something something something)

You get this message when you try to set the boot priority, or when you actually try to boot from the CD?

Write the message down next time, so we at least have something to Google for?

You're not going to be able to reformat unless you can boot from external media of some sort.
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Re: Can't reformat in windows 7?

Mon May 28, 2012 9:52 pm

What JBI said. Also, if you're having problems with your media, Microsoft does make the media for all versions of Windows Vista and 7 freely downloadable via DigitalRiver links. If you've got a good serial, that's all the rest you'd need. If it's an OEM machine, that came with Windows 7 preinstalled, you may have a restore partition you can make use of, as well.
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paulWTAMU
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Re: Can't reformat in windows 7?

Tue May 29, 2012 9:00 am

I'll be going over there this week; I'll write down the message then. It's when we try to get in to select boot priority; it doesn't automatically attempt to boot from disc.
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