Now that you have all your crap stored somewhere else besides your hard drive, you need to get everything together to prepare for your formatting.

1. Grab a Windows 98 System Disk. Or whatever version of Windows you use, get a system disk for it. You’d be a stuck puppy if you format everything and don’t have a system disk. Hopefully you are using Windows 98, since it’s system disks have the built-in ability to jump start your CD-ROM. In Windows 95, for example, you’d have to set up your CD-ROM separately which is a real pain in the wazoo. and, since most OS’s come on CD, this ability is a god-send. If you do not have a system disk made, its about time you do. A good way to do this is to Format a blank diskette in Explorer and before hitting the Go button you check “Copy System Files”. This will create a nice fresh boot disk.
2. Drivers, drivers, drivers. Its very important you verify you have them all ready BEFORE hosing your drive. Some of the drivers are available on the Windows CD, but, most modern hardware has drivers newer than your OS, so you need to go out and fetch them unless you want your $200 video card spitting out 16 colors. Go into your CD storage and gather up all the manufacturer CDs for your computer’s hardware. Also, hop over to each manufacturer’s web site and look for up-to-date drivers. Since you’re going to all this hassle, you might as well update your drivers while you’re at it. Make sure you have your motherboard’s CD, too. A lot of the newer chipsets today don’t have drivers built-in to Windows that will work. So, either have a CD, or pop over to their web site and download the latest chipset drivers. Make special attention you have the drivers for your modem or NIC now. Unless you download all your new drivers now and save them, without modem drivers later, that means no going online later to download them.

Stand by to Hose

Up till now, you haven’t changed your system at all (at least I didn’t tell you to). But, we’re getting ready to now. First, test your system disk. Shut down all your programs, pop your system diskette in Drive A, restart your system. It should pick up the fact that the diskette is in there and begin booting from it. It will ask you if you want to boot with CD-ROM support. Of course you do, so choose that option. When its done grinding, you will have your drive partition letters, CD-ROM drive, and a RAMDRIVE as an extra letter. If it all works, then you got a good disk.