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
Aefdisk (shareware) is better. Find a floppy and use it. If I remember correctly, you need to reset the MBR (master boot record) to get rid of the NT Boot Loader. (Other FReepers, correct me if I'm wrong. It's been a while since I've done this.) Alternatively, use a GNU/Linux install disc to repartition the hard disk.