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reformatting troubles

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by ty366

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I have a computer with two hard drives. On the first was Windows XP. I want to give this computer to my daughter. I wanted to reinstall xp thinking it would allow me to reformat hard drive in the process. It didn't. In fact, it installed it on the other hard drive (I wasn't paying attention...assumed c would be default). I can't uninstall xp on either drive with "add/remove". I think I deleted the uninstall files. I just want to reformat the c drive and start again, but every time I tryit says "unable to complete". I assume this is because it has the OS on it. How can i overcome this? I tried to reinstall Win 98 but I can't do that either.

2 replies

by thechas

You need a boot floppy with fdisk on it.

A Windows 98 startup disk will do the job.

You can create 1 on any running W98 PC from add/remove programs, click on the startup disk tab.

Or, you can download image files from www.bootdisk.com
or www.madboot.com

CAUTION: Deleting partitions with Fdisk WILL loose all data on the drive.
Make sure that any critical files are saved first.

Boot from the startup floppy.
(change startup order in BIOS settings if needed)

from the DOS prompt, run fdisk.
Follow the screens, and delete the partitions on the drive.
(If you setup XP for NTFS, you will need to delete the non-DOS partition.)
Exit fdisk, and restart the PC.

To perform a clean install of XP, boot from the CD.

To perform a clean install of W98,
Boot from the floppy, Run fdisk and partition the drives as desired.
Exit fdisk, and re-boot.
From the DOS prompt,
Format at least the C: drive:
format C: /s (the /s copies the system files onto the drive and makes the C: drive bootable)
After the format completes, insert the W98 CD into the drive and run setup.

Chas

by dragononedon

Using xp go to my computer (make sure that the hard drive that you want to format is not the c drive.) then right click the drive you want to format choose format and then the file system ntfs or fat32.

Win98 is a fat filing system and is not recoginized by XP which is ntfs. So if you formated your harddrive in ntfs w98 cannot be loaded

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