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Formating hard drive old school style is a skill that any seasoned
hardware veteran must know like a bible. Windows 98 is now 8 years, but its
boot disk is still the preferred method of formatting hard drive for most of
the PC enthusiasts.
This sort of skill is not something that you can learn in 5 minutes. You will
need… err… 8 full minutes to learn it, 10 if you are the kind which
has a short attention span, maybe twelve if you decide to sip your coffee while
you read this.
So the first thing you need to get that miracle boot diskette is a rather normal
diskette and a computer which happens to have Windows 98 installed. Now using
the index finger and the thumb gently insert the diskette in the floppy drive
while Windows is running. Now go to Control Panel select the Add/ Remove Software
icon and from there click on the… you have guessed it… the startup
disk option, click create disk and voila you now have your very own Windows
98 boot disk.
With this valuable tool at hand you can now go and format just about any partition
you want. This comes very handy as you may want to create partitions on a brand
new hard drive. Add the hard drive, put in the boot, push the power button and
watch the miracle happen. Well it won't be much of a miracle as your hard drive
doesn't have any partitions yet. So create the partitions using FDISK. As a
tip always use percentages and also make sure that you enable the large disk
support or you might end up with a lot of very small partitions. You should
also be aware that you won't be bale to create NTFS partitions using the Windows
98 boot disk.
Ok… Now what? You have your partitions done, but you are still not able
to do anything with them. This is because you must format them first. So depending
on the number of partitions you have created you must type in FORMAT [drive
letter]: in order to make those partitions usable. For example in order to format
the C drive type in the command prompt FORMAT C: . Now you should be aware that
if you additional hard drives installed beforehand you should only format the
ones that just appeared.
And these steps my friends is the beloved skill of formating hard drive. Now
this wasn't very hard. Was it? Takes some first hand experience to properly
get it right, but in the end it is rather easy to do it.
Part 3:
How to format hard drive for Windows XP
If you want to know how to format hard drive for Windows XP read carefully this guide. I will give you step by step instructions on how to perform partitioning and formatting using nothing more than your original Windows XP cd.
The whole idea for which you might want to use the Windows XP cd in the...
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When
formatting a hard drive there are many possible approaches
and thus many ways of screwing things up. I will cover with
a great deal of detail all the aspects of what formatting
hard drive really means.
