Fdisk /mbr ???

[_-=GODSPEED=-_]

what does "fdisk/mbr" does. my friend types it before formatting the hardrive and setting up a new OS. he does it only with his Win98BootDisk.

Thanx GURU!

GODSPEED!!!

[HAL9000]

/mbr repairs the master boot record and is NOT required on a new hard disk. You only need to do it to restore the master boot record in a situation where it becomes corrupt.

[_-=GODSPEED=-_]

thanx dude! one more question man, how about the 7floppy disks that my friend's inserting one by one in order to scan the boot sectors of the drive. he told me its pccillin. how can i make those floppy disks? do you have any ideas about that? what is that for?

any help will be appreciated.
Thanx GURU!

GODSPEED!!!

[HAL9000]

If he's doing it on an install... WTF for? I'm not overly familiar with PC-Cillin, but I would imagine that there is a utility within Windows for creating the disks.

[GaryRouth]

Sounds like he's doing an anti-virus scan in DOS. PC-Cillin is TrendMicro's antivirus program. Your friend (just as Hal figured) made those most likely from a Windows version of PC-Cillin. The reason he has so many disks is probably to load in all the recent virus definitions.

He's rather doing things the hard way, though. If a system can boot from a CD, he could run the program from that, with only perhaps one or two extra write-protected floppies to hold the latest definitions.

Along with Hal, I'm assuming that your friend only does this with used hard drives, not new. No reason to scan something fresh from the factory. (Besides, you have to format - which would destory a virus if there were one) . . . which brings up another point: if the data on the drive isn't going to be kept, completely reformatting the drive will remove any viruses & be a bit quicker.
. . . Gary

[_-=GODSPEED=-_]

thanx dudes! your great!

GODSPEED!!!

[glc]

Completely formatting in this context means a zero fill - formatting won't kill everything.