Reformat an partition??? Help!

[parkypoo22]

Okay,
last night i decided that my computer needed drastic measures to sort out a few problems. So i spent all night backup-ing my files and important data. How the he*l do i go about a complete reformat/deletion/whatever you call it of my hard drive???
While im at it i also want to partition my drive so that i can run red hat 8.0 OS aswell as windows 98se. Yet again it dont have a clue what im doing there either! Any help would be greatly appreciated...
Cheers Parky :-)

[ktkendall]

You'll want to start with the win98 startup disk and use it to boot from. When you get to the A:\ you simply type fdisk and you see just how to set up to partitions. You reboot after that is done, (still from the boot diskette), and then from A:\ you can than format the drive simply by typing format C:
I don't know how yo get the partition for linux formatted though, I would think that there is either a boot disk or with the installation process for linux you can do the formatting of that partition!

[crow]

Divide your drive into 2 portions of whatever size you want, format (C) & install Windows. Do nothing with the remaining portion. Restart your computer with the Linux boot disc and Linux will install on the remaining portion taking care of the partitioning. Worked for me.
-
Len

[Cricket]

Hi parkypoo22,

You'll need to fdisk and format your hard drive, so follow the instructions here: FDISK & FORMAT. You'll need a good boot disk or you can boot to the Win98SE CD to perform these tasks.

To make a good boot disk, you can use the Win98SE CD. Put the CD into a CD-ROM drive of a working computer and then look for \tools\mtsutil\fat32ebd\fat32ebd.exe and double click on that file. Have a formatted floppy disk ready and follow the instructions.

To boot to the Win98SE CD, you'll have to make a change in BIOS so that the CD-ROM is your first boot device.

Cricket

[David_Jones]

Just a slight addition to Crickets excellent post.

I don't think you need to make the CD-ROM the first boot device.

I always set mine up in this order:

- Floppy
- CD-ROM
- Hard disk

That way I can easily chose without having to change the BIOS again, since it will look for a floppy, and if there is no bootable floppy, it will try the CD, and if there is no bootable CD, it will go the the HDD.

HTH.

David.