New Hard Drive System Boot etc

[freptide]

Hello All,
Im planning on building a system after christmas. Its my first one so I had a few questions. If anyone can oblige I would be grateful. I was wondering which steps come first as far as getting the system up to the point of installing os on hard drive. To boot would i use the hard drive pre packaged disk after I use startup disk? Ive read alot of articles on this but they seem to general and Id like to get it right the first time. Im using win98se. Basically I just dont want to have to deal with dos and hope I can make it as painless as possible. thanks. My specs for the system are below
AMD xp1600 cpu
ASUS A7M266
ATI All in one radeon
Crucial 256 ddr 2100

[pcoopers]

Yes, use your proprietary disk preparation floppy, It will ask what kind of OS you plan to install, and it will prepare a bootable partition based on answers you provide.

Windows has the ability to do all that for itself, but f-disk and format take about 1500% more time than utilities running under DrDOS. (I've assumed you have a Maxtor or Western HDD, they use similar utilities, both DrDOS)

A boot floppy (or CD) from any partition manager\boot manager will do just about as well.

[freptide]

Yes its a 40gb Western digital 7200rpm. My Other computer is an Alienware 1.5 pentium 4 with 850 motherboard and geforce 2 ddr 64. Don't buy Alienware , because they use the cheapest parts. I wish I would have built an AMD in the first place. Ive done plenty of formats but never installed a new
hard drive with a new system. I think the reason I got bit by the builders bug is because I had to go and buy this case. Its the Antec sx635 with 350watt ps
w/ room for a family of fans! What a solid case this is, but the vents are sure to pull in alot of dust. Thanks for the help pcoopers, I will be ready for my build now.

[Cricket]

Hi freptide,

This website has an excellent "Build Your Own PC" tutorial that you might want to go over: http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/index.htm

There's a section on hard drive preparation that should help to explain what you have to do in order to get the hard drive ready for the OS: http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/step/24/

And here's the section on installing the OS: http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/step/26/

:) Cricket