Clearing the Hard Drive

[Nitro]

Alright... so I am working with a pretty screwed up computer right now. It is running Win98. I have made back-up copies of all the Word and Excel files on floppies and now I think I want to flatten the hard drive... clear it all and start from new. How do I do this? Detailed instructions would be great.... in easy to understand terms haha. Thanks

[pcdoc4christ]

Nitro:

Basic steps:

1. Make sure your Windows 98 CD is not very badly scratched and is not an upgrade (but a full version) CD.

2. Back up all the files you want to save to a CD (if you have a CD-R or CD-RW optical drive) or to floppy disks.

3. Make a Windows 98 or Me bootable floppy disk.

4. Restart your computer with the boot disk (you do not have to enable CD-ROM support yet).

5. At the command prompt type FDISK and press Enter.

6. Follow the instructions to enable large disk support, delete all the partitions, make one large partition formatted with FAT32 (not FAT or FAT16)

7. Restart the computer with the boot disk still in the floppy drive (you do not have to enable CD-ROM support yet).

8. At the command prompt (i.e. the A:\>) type FORMAT C: and press Enter.

9. When the format operation is complete, restart your computer (this time be sure to enable CD-ROM support).

10. Put the Windows 98 CD in the optical drive.

11. At the command prompt, type D:\Setup and press Enter.

12. The Windows 98 setup program will begin; just follow the instructions on your monitor.

For more help, see this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/221829/EN-US/

or post a message at this forum and we will try to help you out.

Regards,
Doc

[Dusty]

Browse here

http://www.probz.com/win98/

Good luck

[Nitro]

Thanks guys... the computer runs like new now!!!