help me :/

[z0dz]

I just got done building my first computer and I made a stupid mistake. When I installed win2000pro I installed it as FAT32 when I meant to do NTFS. I realized this right after windows installed and I went to format, but I can't format in windows. I thought I would insert the win2000pro disk and do a clean install and formatting my c: drive. When I went to install i told it to convert the drive to a NTFS drive and setup told me that it would overwrite all windows files on that partition.

Setup never installed windows on that partition and gave me a bunch of errors. Now when I turn on my computer I get 2 choices to boot from:

Windows 2000 Professional Edition
Windows 2000 Professional Edition Setup

When I choose to boot windows (not the setup) it gives me a error saying it can't find a file, then my computer freezes. When I choose the setup it wont let me install windows to another partition, and when I go into the console repair thing I can't format my c: because of a missing AUTOFMT.EXE. I copied that file to a disk and tried to enter that path and it seems to go, but then the computer just reboots.




This is my first time building a computer, and this is the first time I've used windows 2000 from my home pc. Is there anyway to fix this?

[Murf]

Welcome to CTH

Here is the painless way.

Boot with a Win 98 boot disk: Get one HERE

After you down load the file Windows 98 Custom, No Ramdrive double click on it and it will expand the boot files to a floppy.

When you boot with this floppy say NO to cdrom support.

At the A:\> prompt format the drive. When done, reboot get into BIOS and set the first boot device to CDROM. Put the W2K CD in, now you can tell it to partition/format as NTFS and reinstall.

There are other ways, but you have a corrupt installation, so why not start at the beginning.