Formatting ???

[UkGamer]

Woohoo, im finnaly getting a new 3.4ghz, 256mb x600 pro, 1gb ram pc so i can play HL2 :P
However i just relised i gonna need to sell this shed of a computer. Question is how do i format it and instal all drivers, this is what i know so far and please correct me if i'm wrong

(using win98se by the way)

step 1 : goto dos, type format c: and wait half an hour till its finished
step 2 : put windows 98se disc in, install windows
step 3 : put rest of drivers in graphics modem etc

im sure ive misssed somthing , i have a motherboard cd what do i do with that?

[Juan_Achilles]

If you have successfully installed the windows go to device manager and look for te items with a yellow exclamation point. Items with the mark are the ones needing the drivers. I suggest you do windows update and download the latest directx.

More power to you my friend!

[Dan Penny]

To add a bit to Juan's post, if you're selling the 98SE machine you may want to blank the hard disk(s) with a zero fill or similar utility. Zero fills can be downloaded from the disk manufacturers websites. You can do a Google or similar search for killdisk, (there's a free version) which will totally wipe the disk clean, leaving ~NOTHING~. Actually, killdisk is on my webspace, if you want to use it, you can get it there.

If you use killdisk or a zero fill, you will have to partition the disk with MS Fdisk or another partitioning utility first, ~then~ format any newly created partitions. If you're not familiar with this procedure, do searches on "fdisk howto" or "disk partitioning instruction" or have someone who knows about it do this step for you.

The motherboard CD (if it's the correct one for that systems motherboard) should contain your motherboard chipset drivers, along with any on-board sound or video drivers. It should stay with the machine when you sell it.

[UkGamer]

doesnt format delete everything anyway, or does it just make it free to write over but its still there. There wasnt anything major personal anyway

[Dan Penny]

Formatting will "clear" the FAT (File Allocation Table) entries. These are the "map" of the file locations on the partition.

In simple terms, the format marks these FAT areas as "OK to write new data to". The "original" files data however remains in the partitions sectors/clusters until other "new" data is written over that space. Thus anyone who knows what they are doing can retrieve that "old" data.

Zero fill utilities and such will write zeros (or other characters) to every sector on the disk. Thus ~ALL~ data is overwritten, including all disk partition info, which is why the disk must be partitioned again.

[UkGamer]

sounds a bit complicated and i was just planning on selling it to some computer novice who was just going to use it for word processing anyway, but thanks for your ideas

do my cdrom/dvd drives need drivers?

[Dan Penny]

If you're running cdrom's in RAW DOS, yes, you need drivers. These are put in place via the config.sys file. The MSCDEX to run the controllers is loaded with autoexec.bat, or on the command line. All this driver loading is accomplished when you boot the system to DOS with either a floppy, bootable cd, or the hard drive, depending on how you set it up.