Help Formatting

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Benny

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I formatted a friends pc yesterday and I will do my bros p166 today. It has 3 hard drives on it running win98se. I only want to keep one of them and remove the other 2. How would I go about doing that. Do I make a boot disk, delete partitions create another partition, disconnect the other two and put the other to primarty master. Let me know of the proper steps. Thanks in advance.
 
I only want to keep one of them and remove the other 2.

Do you mean you want to format two of the three drives? Or you want to remove the hard drives from the PC.

If you mean to format two of the three drives, you will need a windows 98 boot disk, and a little common sense!

Once you have your boot disk, determine which hard drive you want to KEEP!! You dont want to format it by accident. If you have the case open, I would even disconnedt the power connection to make sure it isn't formatted by accident.

If/when you do this, just boot the computer with the Win98 boot disk (You don't need CD-ROM Support at the moment so go ahead and choose - without cd-rom support and save yourself a few minutes of loading time)

Once you are at the dos prompt ( A:\ ) you will want to type FDISK to see how your hard drives are setup. You will probably have to switch between the two drived (usually number 5) and make sure you double-check it is the drive you want to delete. You will see the partition letter (C: or D: etc.) and once you are satisfied it is the drive you intend on formatting.. you can begin.

Exit the FDISK utility and get ready to go, you should be at the DOS prompt now. ( A:\ ) You can go ahead and type the following...


A:\ format C: (assuming C: is the drive you want to delete)


Press enter and the format will begin. Once it is completed do the exact same thing with the other hard drive and you are ready to go!!:beard:
 
Benny said:
wat about configuring the system bios

Most of the time if you have you BIOS on autodetect, you don't have to make any changes. It should pick up any changes automatically.

If you plan on just formatting the hard drives, you don't have to make any changes to the BIOS because there is no physical change, just a high level format on the drive.
 
I want to format all 3 hard drives. But keep only one of them in my pc, so that I can use the other 2 for something else
 
In that case its very simple. Follow the directions I posted above on all three hard drives.... and your done! (Just remember you need to know the drive letter assignments so you can format it.. C: D: E: etc.)
 
wat about partitioning the 3 hard drives? Also at wat stage do I physically remove the 2 hard rives from my pc? After I do that, I configure the system bios rite?
 
this is what I would do..

After I format all three drives, powe off the computer. Remove the unwanted hard drives, and start the computer.

The bios will autodetect the changes and you will probably get an "Operating System Not Found" error if you just boot the computer.

Once you boot the computer using the boot disk, you should only have one hard drive in your PC. Since you just formatted it, the partitions should be intact!


The other two drives that you removed.. should also have their partitions intact (Remember, when you format a hard drive, the partition is NOT deleted... just the data within the partion) Do what you need with them, they should be ok.


Again, if your BIOS is set on autodetect you don't have to worry about going into the BIOS to make any changes. You will know its on autodetect when the computer is booting up.. it will just show the one drive "xxxxxxx hard drive detected - primary" or something similar.
 
ok i I deleted the partitions as opposed to keeping them, wat will be different. I will probably delete all partitions and then create 1 , then format. does that sound rite
 
Thats sounds about right...

If you delete a partition, you need to create a new partition or else the format utility will say "What partition are you talking about silly human, there is nothing for me to format"

Just create a primary partition, then reboot....... after rebooting you can start the format of the drive.
 
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