How do I reformat a hard drive?

[Talk2Me]

I've done it before when the computer had a floppy drive, but what if a computer doesn't have a floppy drive?

Do I put fdisk and format on some kind of bootable CD?

I reuse my old hard drives in new machines, but they don't have a floppy, so I'm stuck.

Thanks.

[Steve]

If you're using W2k or XP as your OS you can simply boot to the installation CD and format from there.

If you're using W98, you would need to get to a computer that has a floppy drive and a CD burner. Most of the new burning software (I've used Nero and Roxio) have an option to create a bootable CD. Use a W98 boot disk as your source and you'll end up with the boot disk on CD.

There might other ways to do it but this is all I can think of at the moment. (not enough coffee yet... :rolleyes: )

[Fruss Tray Ted]

ME is bootable also and my copy of 98SE does not but I am aware of another version of 98SE that may.

You can download the iso file to make a bootable cd from http://Bootdisk.com and either put that onto a disk in one optical drive and the os in the burner or combine the two if only one optical drive is available.

If you go the first way I described, make sure and put plenty more programs onto the cd because if you don't the data line will look like a scratch and if you don't realize it's a burned cdr, it may even get overlooked by the cd-rom. You can fit 486 floppies one one cd so that should give you the idea on how big the 'scratch' would be on cdr.
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