deleting hard drive OS system

[redwritter]

New to the tech world
question: i have a maxtor hard drive that i installed in a box given to me. I also installed a new mother board "iwill kk266" AMD athlon processor, and 300 wt power supply . I want to delete my operating system "Windows 98SE" from the hard drive and start all over because im having problems freezing at the windows start up screen, and ive been told i should have deleted the hard drive anyway before i installed all this stuff. i can get on in safe mode-so im wondering is there away to delete and clear this hard drive from safe mode in this box...its the only box i have, so i cant take it to another box and do this. thank you all

[RJ]

get into dos mode, start fdisk (type in: fdisk) and delete all partitions there.
Now create the partitions you want, exit fdisk, boot from your Windows CD and format the partitions. Now just run setup and install Windows.

RJ

[redwritter]

thanks rj!!!

to get into dos from safe mode i just go to run and type dos? or another way? do you know a web site where it takes you step by step how to partition add os systems etc? im going to install windows NT after i delete it all.

[RJ]

To get into dos you have to go to "Start" > "Shut Down" > "Start in DOS mode". It doesn't matter whether you do this from normal or safe mode - I also think it's not possible from safe mode. Anyway, you don't need Safe Mode. Just get into dos and delete all partitions. You'll see the menu items once you are in fdisk (Remove paritions, etc.).
So Windows NT will it be. Well, I don't know much about it, but WinNT might be able to format the hard drive during the install process. Anyway, I'm not sure.

RJ

[Floppyman]

Hi...

By installing window NT I see a couple problems. Windows NT uses either the FAT16 file system or NTFS. Now windows fdisk will only create FAT 16 or FAT 32 partitions. However....FAT 16 partitions are limited to 2 gig a piece and making a FAT 32 partition won't work with Windows NT. I think there are some third party programs (like Partition Magic) out there that will let you create NTFS partitions however. Oh yeah..one more thing: I'm sure you know this but Windows NT is not plug and play at all so you may run into some problems with your newer hardware. HTH

[glc]

Before you go reformatting the drive, check out the post in Tips and Tricks about the ENUM key - this might just get your existing Windows 98 install working well again. It's one of the "top" posts in the forum.