Big problem with reinstalling Windows

[ZealEmpire]

Hey guys I just had to format my computer because I got a bad virus the my virus scanner did not pick up for me.  So to make a long story short I have been trying to reinstall my operating system.  Being on XP I was NTFS as you know.  However I realize I am going to have to install Windows 98 and then us my dell xp upgrade cd to install a fresh copy of xp.  But there is something wrong with my partitions on my harddrive.  There is only one partition and it is like 5,368mb...My harddrive is a WD Raptor at 74gb.  I am a little lost here.  All I want to do is get my drive to be partitioned so I can install 98 then from that point on I will just put back xp with ntfs.  Can someone help me out with this problem.

I just formateed the drive and it said formatting 5,368.03M...This is not the capacity of my HD.

[patio]

What are you using to format that drive ? ?
Use the WD utilities to prepare that HDD for use making sure you set the drive as active...

Then boot to your XP CD and run setup.

You don't need to install Win 98 just insert the CD when prompted for a prior ver. of Windows.

[GX1_Man]

UNLESS that is some kind of a "restore CD" instead of a real Windows CD.  

[street1 (RIP)]

http://files.frashii.com/~bootdisk/alabama/boot98se.exe

Download the above file and make a bootdisk.

Boot with the win98 bootdisk, start fdisk and select show drive information I think it's option4.

Tell us what it reports.

Hope you have a 3.5 floppy drive. They sure are important.

[2k_dummy]

There is a glitch in fdisk when reporting large drive sizes. It reports the difference in its preset size and the actual size. The MS support site has an updated version of fdisk that supposedly corrects this.

[ZealEmpire]

Thanks a lot guys I was able to get a  fresh copy of Windows Vista installed but i am still left with this missing amount of memory on my hard drive.  Vista is listing it as 69gb total but the hd is 74gb capacity.  Is there any windows based utilities out there that can free up this missing space?  I hate going into DOS and doing it that way.

[patio]

Actually those numbers are pretty close to correct...HDD manuf. report a slightly larger size so your actual size is around 69G.

And it's not memory on your HDD it's free space or storage.

Memory is RAM.

[ZealEmpire]

Thanks sorry for the wrong meaning i typed noob