Reformat Question

When my computer was new, it had Windows 98 se installed. I since have upgraded to Windows XP Home Edition using the upgrade disc. I'm wanting to completely reformat my hard drive but from my understanding I can't use the Windows XP upgrade disc? I have a copy of the full Windows 98 SE edition on Cd, a Windows 98 Boot Disk, and an upgrade CD for Windows XP Home Edition. Also I'm using the NTFS file system.

How should I proceed? Purchase a software designed for reformatting or do a manual reformat? If a manual reformat, I don't know where to start so I can completely reformat, reinstall Windows 98 and then upgrade to Windows XP.

Thanks for any help with this

 

waterdog,

You can do a 'clean' (full) install using the upgrade disk (it contains the full version of Windows). You will need your Win98 disk to verify the upgrade (just place it in the drive when asked for it). Here is a good guide to the process... The Elder Geek. If you have any problems post back.

B

 

Thanks Mr. B
I read over the info of the link you provided. Here is what I did last night. I put the Windows XP upgrade Cd into the cd drive and then rebooted. Before that I went into the BIOS and checked "boot from cd-rom drive ". Ok, everything went well but after the install, I still had a lot of files left over that should have been deleted so I'm thinking I missed a step or something. I did check the "complete install" and it never asked for the 98 cd for verification.

I have heard that you can go to "My Computer" and then right click on your main drive and select "format ". I just did that and it allows you to format and then gives an option of "quick format" and "enable compression "

 

waterdog,

Take a look at this guide... WindowsReinstall. It shows you the proper steps to delete your existing windows installation and create a new partition. You can't format your system (Windows) drive from MyComputer. That would not be good.

B

 

If you had gone one step further, you would have found out that Windows will not allow you to format the drive that contains the operating system files.

What files are you referring to?

It sounds like you did a Windows re-install and did not format the drive. That's fine if you want to retain all of your user created files and any programs that you have installed after Windows was initially installed.

If that was not your intent, you should format the drive before re-installing Windows. You can do that using the tools made available by the Windows install CD.

Take a look at the following link for some further insight:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

 

You can also go to the Manufacture of your HD and get a utility that will fit on a Floppy (or you can use a CD) that is bootable. When you put the Floppy in and turn on your PC, all you have to do is type the Command line that they give you and it will write 0 (zero) to the HD erasing all that is on there. I am in a PC club that gets donated PC's quite often and that is the first thing that we do. We do it 3 times then install the OS on it and update it and then add AVG and ZA and a couple of Spyware Programs and then they are ready to donate to the needy in the community.
By doing the above mentioned, it makes the HD look new. There may still be recoverable stuff on there but it would take some work to do.

 

Same thing as what I suggested. Most will tell you that 1 is ok but more is better. Writes differently each time.

 

Thanks for all the info here. I went out last night and purchased a program that is user friendly and will format my drive. I did that and it worked perfectly. I was able to choose from several different levels of cleaning and so I was happy with the software.