Formating hard drive - the old style
Formating hard drive old school style is a skill that any seasoned hardware veteran must know like a bible. Windows 98 is now 8 years, but its boot disk is still the preferred method of formatting hard drive for most of the PC enthusiasts. This sort of skill is not something that you can learn in 5 minutes. You will need… err… 8 full minutes to learn it, 10 if you are the kind which has a short attention span, maybe twelve if you decide to sip your coffee while you read this. So the first thing you need to get that miracle boot diskette is a rather normal diskette and a computer which happens to have Windows 98 installed. Now using the index finger and the thumb gently insert the diskette in the floppy drive while Windows is running. Now go to Control Panel select the Add/ Remove Software icon and from there click on the… you have guessed it… the startup disk option, click create disk and voila you now have your very own Windows 98 boot disk. With this valuable tool at hand you can now go and format just about any partition you want. This comes very handy as you may want to create partitions on a brand new hard drive. Add the hard drive, put in the boot, push the power button and watch the miracle happen. Well it won't be much of a miracle as your hard drive doesn't have any partitions yet. So create the partitions using FDISK. As a tip always use percentages and also make sure that you enable the large disk support or you might end up with a lot of very small partitions. You should also be aware that you won't be bale to create NTFS partitions using the Windows 98 boot disk. Ok… Now what? You have your partitions done, but you are still not able to do anything with them. This is because you must format them first. So depending on the number of partitions you have created you must type in FORMAT [drive letter]: in order to make those partitions usable. For example in order to format the C drive type in the command prompt FORMAT C: . Now you should be aware that if you additional hard drives installed beforehand you should only format the ones that just appeared. And these steps my friends is the beloved skill of formating hard drive. Now this wasn't very hard. Was it? Takes some first hand experience to properly get it right, but in the end it is rather easy to do it.
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