reformatting Win98

[Taz202]

I've been having lots of stability issues with my Win98 machine so I decided I would try wiping the hard drive and re installing windows. My computer is about six years old and I've been told this should be done periodically anyway. I've gone through the forums and got lots of info but am still a little unsure of what steps to take.
Can I format from my win cd or do I need to download something? Do I need to download all my drivers or can I not get them off my cds.? I still have them for my printer, vid card etc. I read in one of the posts that win98 drivers where a pain to find, causing some confusion on my part. Short break there. I just read a post which helped with some questions while raising another. The guy talks about a restoration cd. I'm sure I don't have one though. I have my win98 cd, but I'm sure he's refering to something else. Any ideas about how I can get around this?
Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.
thanks in advance

 

[Fallen Angel]

All you really need is a bootdisk along with your win98 cdrom. Make sure you do have all the drivers you need, video, printers, audio, enet or usb modem etc.. before you do so as once you wipe the drive, they are gone.

Also make sure to back up your data to cd as well; documents, pictures, emails, email address book, favorites that sort of thing.

Go here to get a win 98 bootdisk, make sure its the one you need as win98 has a few flavors : http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

After backing up everything, toss in the floppy disk and reboot your machine. You may have to go into BIOS to set your pc to boot from the A: first. Do that, reboot and it will run the bootdisk.

Simply type format c: at the prompt if you have just the one drive/partition to clear. Or if you have multiple partitions and want to resize or make any adjustments you will need to type fdisk at the prompt to get those options.

Once you clear the drive, remove the floppy, insert the win98 cdrom and reboot. Go back to BIOS and set it to boot from cdrom and restart again. That will take you to the win98 setup from cdrom and just follow along with the prompts. Good luck.

 

[DarkMassacre]

Hey I am gonna wipe this comp too. Can anyone give me very detaled instructions of what to do? And I would also like to install windows 2000 instead of going back to 98. Do I need to get the drivers or is the windows 2000 disc all I need?

 

[Fallen Angel]

Same principle as my above post. Make sure you have the proper drivers you require, ethernet, video, audio, etc ..

As far as detailed instructions, try this link :
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/win2k_pro_install.asp

 

[DarkMassacre]

I'm not quite sure as to which win 2000 bootdisk I should get. And what is the mirror? One other thing, how do I aquire these drivers? I'm not sure which ones I need.

EDIT: Nevermind about the mirror thing. I found out what it is.

 

[Fallen Angel]

Well for drivers, you would look up specific hardware information from the manufacturers site. Ie, if you have a realtek rtl 8139 enet card, you would download those drivers from their site.

Do the same for your video card, sound card etc. To find out which device you have, look them up in the device manager.
Start>settings>control panel>system>hardware>device manager

 

[TheMajor]

You need 4 bootdisk (floppy disks) for loading Windows 2000 setup. The CD-ROM contains a folder called BOOTDISK. It contains a .bat (batch file) for creating the disks under DOS and an executable for creating them under Windows. Reboot, set A: (diskette drive) as primary boot device, insert disk 1, reboot.

 

[DarkMassacre]

Ah damn it. Sorry for all the questions. I dont really know how to do this as I've necer installed a new OS on this thing. I found out I have a NVIDIA TNT2 M64 4xAGP video card but I dont know the site or how to find the drivers on it. I typed that in a looked around a few sites but I'm not sure which to go to.

 

[TheMajor]

www.nvidia.com
Just select the driver package for GeForce and TNT cards.

 

[DarkMassacre]

Thanks. Crap. I gotta remove the current video NVIDIA display drivers to do it. Hope I dont **** it up somehow.