[50sDad]

I would like to reformat it for Win98SE, but I remember there is some kind of custom formatting for XP. Can anyone tell me what the special fix is for doing this?

[do not press 2 for spanish]

.45 to the hard-drive, IIRC.

[Delta 21]

Dig up your old Win95 boot floppy and use the FDisk command. Erase everything on the hard drive and start from scratch.

[harwood]

http://killdisk.com

[HangThemHigh]

If the hard drive is formatted for NTFS file system (the norm for XP), you will probably need to reformat the hard drive to get the FAT system used by Win98. I’m not sure of the issues here, but you need to look at this.

[MarkL]

It was my experience over the years that if you didn’t start off with a really “clean” partition table and mbr that you would have problems later on, especially if you were trying to go from NTFS (or HPFS) to FAT or FAT32. Just fdisk-ing and formatting the drive doesn’t take care of this issue. There are 2 ways to do this. The first is the simplest: Go to www.killdisk.com and get their free disk erase utility. You can download it as either a bootable floppy image or a bootable CD image. This could take a while to run. Or, if you have a bootable floppy with the debug utility on it, you could run this script. CAUTION!!!! THIS SCRIPT WILL WIPE YOUR DISK. THOUGH YOUR DATA CAN BE RECOVERED, IT WON’T BE PARTICULARLY EASY NOR CHEAP TO DO SO!!!!!!

F 200 L200 0
A 100
MOV AX,301
MOV BX,200
MOV CX,1
MOV DX,0080
INT 13
INT 3
G=100
Q

(reboot the computer at this point)

You must boot to DOS (or command prompt Win9x) for this to work. And it must be the primary DOS accessible drive (C:).

Mark

[Petronski]

You should get an option for FAT32 formatting when you install 98SE. Do that.

If it doesn’t specify the disk format, just use the “format entire disk” option.

You want FAT32, not NTFS.

[holymoly]

As I recall, you'll need to use FDISK to first remove the NTFS partition, then create a new partition (or partitions).

Also, keep in mind that Windows 98 has issues with hard drives larger than 137gb. (48-bit LBA and Windows 98, 98 SE, Me.)

You can download a Windows 98 bootdisk from Bootdisk.com.

[Xenalyte]

You really want to downgrade from the decent XP to the hideous 98? Why?

[Petronski]

You’re getting some serious overkill advice here. Just reformat it to FAT32 and install 98SE.