Reformat HD with XP or Win2k

[Rick]

My boss came up to me and asked me to reformat one of our HD's and reload that computer with Win98. I told him no problem until I realized that you can't just boot into dos with a Win98 boot disk. It won't see the NTFS. How do I get Win2K off my hard drive without putting on another OS in another partition?

Rick:rolleyes:

[Aaron]

You can use the win98 boot disk. Use the FDISK tool and delete the 'NON-FAT' partition it reports, cos thats NTFS. You can then create a new partition, and format as FAT32, then install win98 back on. (remember to enable large disk support upon starting the fdisk.exe program when it asks, so that it will format as FAT32 instead of FAT16)

FDISK.exe is on the win98 bootdisk.

Alternatively, you can boot from the win2k cd, go through a couple of setup pages, then choose to reformat as FAT32, then abort the win2k setup.

[Rick]

Thanx again Aaron...I tried the first and it would say that there is no NTFS qualifying partition on hard drive and then it gives a command prompt but with no drive letter next to it and when I try fdisk...doesn't work...but the second option...I will give that a try.

Rick:cool:

[typhoonfr]

Hi,

You may find in the BIOS a low level format utility to erase the whole drive.

I heard that western digital also made a little program that writes Zeros to the disk.

I am using a version for Gateway computers called gwscan.exe.

It works fine, I just hope you have only one partition on the drive and no other partition or you will loose everything

regs

[Guest LouCypher]

They don't include the low level format utility in BIOS anymore due to the way large disks (over 2GB) handle sector translation (LBA).