how to reformat a harddrive and reinstall windows

[falsepride]

okay so i have this old computer which since i have my current one has been collecting dust, i never even re-hooked it back up after moving it.

i want to whipe it clean. reformat the harddrive and reinstall windows. it was running windows 98 but id like to instill xp on it this time. i think right now the harddrive is running on fat16, its been so long but i think i remember always seeing something like "fat32 converter . . ." on it. i dont know much about harddrives wit that besides theres fat 16 and 32 and ntfs. but from what i read xp needs fat32 or ntfs.

for what i want to do. is it basically make a boot disk. then i guess uninstall windows. turn on pc with boot disk in it. type in something like format C:/ then exit to restart put the xp disk in the drive and install windows. right? i know thats vague i just summed up what i read last night on http://www.cyberwalker.net/faqs/rein...-FAT32-XP.html

help?

[Belisarius]

Don't worry about it - when you install XP, it'll take care of everything. When it asks you, tell it you want to create a fresh install, delete any and all partitions, and simply install on the free space.

[falsepride]

whens the fun in doing things the easy way?

i actually want to go the the work of making a boot disk and reformating. by doing it ill learn it.

[Belisarius]

The thing is, the XP disc *is* a boot disk. You can use the recovery console to jump to a command line and manually muck around if you want. There isn't a whole lot to learn. Yes, you could format the drive from the command line if you want, but I'm not sure why you would ever want to - I'm not sure it's a skill that'll come in handy. Over the years, Microsoft has made the command line more and more redundant - there's precious little reason to use it, unless you have a very specific reason to (I usually use it for network diagnostics, things like 'ping').

Anyways, the way I and most every other computer geek handles it, is we toss in the XP CD and reinstall, wiping out/preserving partitions as needed. I'm guessing at your skill level from the tone of your post, but I'd suggest you try to simply install XP as a first step. You can try more esoteric things like setting up a RAID if you want to play around more with disks and partitions.

[falsepride]

i wish i could set up a raid on this pc but the harddrive is 1.96 gigs. xp takes up 1 gig from what i remember. which doenst leave any play room

[falsepride]

tried using the xp as boot disk. didnt work. it said upgrade wasnt supported from windows 98.

let me express the age of this computer. . . when you shut down it displays a screen that says"it is now safe to turn off your computer."
this pc was given to us by our old neighbors he work was throwing them away and he mcgivered it for us with various things like usb and sound cards.

now since were poor. he gave us a burned copy of windows 98 because we couldnt afford it. and my smart as a rock family lost it. and i cant create a boot disk without it. id really hate for this pc to be wasted. i was going to have fun experimenting networking pcs together and stuff like that with it. so what do i do?

[redhead]

Goto bootdisk.com and fetch a valid boot image, then use that to format teh harddrive, change partition type, etc. And after that you can make a fresh install from the WinXP cd.

[Belisarius]

You should still be able to wipe out the partitions from the XP install even if the recovery console isn't available to you. But if the computer is as old as you said it is, it might not be able to take XP. You might need to scrounge up a copy of Windows 2000, or use one of the smaller versions of Linux.

[DJMaze]

Won't be XP a huge overload on such system?

Think about it, it probably only has: 10GB HDD, P3 333 MHz, 64 MB RAM.

XP already needs atleast 256MB RAM and a 100MB swap.

Newer isn't always better (i'll never use XP, and maybe even not Vista over 2 years)