2 questions, premature comp. shutdown, and reformat xp

[franklinz]

If youve read my past posts youd see i had alot of problems with my computer. But it seemed to all dissapear when i installed xp home (thank god) untill recently.......
Everything worked great untill i tried to install updated drivers, for my audigy gamer, and rad 9700. When i installed the driver and clicked "finished" my computer would do a hard reboot (it doesnt ask to be restarted, and it reboots fast) didnt happen all the time and it seemed to stop after about 3 times.
And i have constantly been getting "Fatal Error" screens while playing warcraft III or BF1942 talking about my memory, so i bought some pc3200 mushkin as my 512 pc2100 was garbage.
Now to the last straw.... the almighty patch for BF1942 came out today, downloaded the patch went through everything, clicked "finished" BOOOM!!!! Shut down, it goes to the Windows XP screen with the scrolling green squares but after that it restarts my computer every time!!!!
Tried to start it in safe mode, same thing
Tried to start it every which way no difference
So now i tried to do a reformat, but i couldnt.
If i tried to start "using cd rom support" from the cd, and XP would just format the drive instead of reformatting it
If i tried to start up with first boot device being my floppy (win 98) it wont let me "format /s c:" from the d:/
So i just went through with the xp setup.......
Could someone please tell me how to do a proper reformat??
And what the dealio is with my computer?? Oh yeah and i have the turbo setting enabled in my bios, didnt give me problems before so i thought it was clear to run it....
thanks,
franklin
soyo p4x400 mobo
p4 2.4
rad 9700
audigy gamer
dvd player
cd burner
floppy
300 watt power supply (could this be the culprit??)

[Foggy]

The first thing I would do is boot to safe mode and go to device mgr. and check each entry for duplicate entries and if you find any remove both entries and when done reboot and let win replace each driver.
As for formatting from the win98 boot disk the syntax is from the A: prompt "format C: /u /c" using these switches formats unconditionally and you don't need the /s switch for a clean install, I hope this helps.

[PartsMan]

Originally posted by Foggy
As for formatting from the win98 boot disk the syntax is from the A: prompt "format C: /u /c" using these switches formats unconditionally and you don't need the /s switch for a clean install, I hope this helps.

The "U" is for unconditional .....
What's the "C" for ???

[Foggy]

/C switch tests clusters that are currently marked "bad." By default, if a disk contains clusters that have been marked as "bad", FORMAT does not retest the clusters; it simply leaves them marked "bad".

[PresterJohn]

>/C switch tests clusters that are currently marked "bad."

it's really not a good idea to "reuse" marginal disk sectors. if a previous format/scan found them to be bad sectors, it is wiser to let the OS leave them as bad. even if a second pass find them OK...

[PartsMan]

Thanks ... I never knew that.