Reformating without a floppy drive

[jtscio]

Hi, I own a compaq presario R3000 and recently came across a glitch with the dr watson registry file, basically once i restore my operating system it went away, but if i try to install updates or sp2 it get all cray again and i cant open folders or files and my computer becomes worthless...so last resort is to reformat because im hoping that just wiping the hardrive clean and starting over is the best to do as most often it is..

Now usually i know you boot off a floppy disk, but the thing is that my computer didnt come with a floppy drive. im wondering how im supposed to reformat my computer without a boot floppy, if anyone can help me out and tell me how i can reformat my computer and reinstall windows XP, that would be great, thank you.

p.s what i do have cd wise are my, driver recovery cd, operating system cd, critical updates cd, application recovery cd, and documentation library cd. i used the operating system cd to reinstall the OS the first time which was more or less just a restore and not that solution i wanted. again thanks if you can help.

[classicsoftware]

Usually the restore CD will erase the contents of the drive or give you that option. You need to contact Compaq about SP2 on your computer. You may have to disable some services and then re-enable them after the install. Please contact Compaq, they will know.

[jtscio]

the cd restored my computer while retaining all my files, it didnt do a clean wipe of my drives. the problem is that even when i do a regular windows update the dr watson post mortem debugger gives me an error and goes crazy in that it disallows me to click anything and it renders me useless..its just that im not sure how to get to teh bios to set my drive to be reformated, im guessing im supposed to hit something in order to set my boot drive as the cd, but im not sure at all as to going about this..:/ thanks for the response though.

[classicsoftware]

Are you sure there was no option to do a format with tthe restore CD?

You can get into the BIOS by hitting the F10 key on most Compaq's.

Have you attempted to look at the Dr. Watson log in safe mode after the SP2 installation or in the event log to see what is going on. You need to pin down what device/driver/software/DLL is causing the problem or it will probably happen again even if you re-format....

[jtscio]

the solution i first received after a search was to edit a registry file under
Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Key: SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug
Name: Auto
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0 disable

and that supposedly was supposed to fix the problem, if i did a system restore then applied a value of 0, but it just kept coming back regardless of a set value... i keep getting told from people whom i trust to have a valued answer that reformating should be enough to fix it, so im going to try that route and see what happens.

[CuratoR]

On your quesion of how to format without a floppy drive. Use bootable floppy equivalent cds. You can also create bootable cd from a bootable floppy using floppy emulation. Prepare or somehow(maybe from other system having a floppy drive) get a bootable floppy(98 boot floppy should do), create an image of it, and burn that image on a CD with floppy emulation(nero can do that). Now use this cd to boot and do the format.

[Paul Komski]

Compaq does things in such a proprietary manner that Classicsoftware's suggestion of contacting Compaq could be a good move if you cant get the answers from:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/setupCategory?lc=en&lang=en&cc=us&product=385160&dlc=en

There are also two specific faqs to do with SP2, one re processor speed and the other with having enough available and not too fragmented HDD space:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&lang=en&cc=us&product=385160&dlc=en&docname=c00228688
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&lang=en&cc=us&product=385160&dlc=en&docname=c00228717