Boingo_Buzzard Wrote: I have an old PC I was thinking of doing this to to test it out. What do I need to recover it to some kind of working state?

REMEMBER: Formatting your HD (or partitioning it) will clear out everything on it. Nothing will be recoverable, but you will have a clean drive to install an OS...

There are two easy ways if your using older Microsoft OS's such as Win9x, NT, or DOS...

1.) If you have DOS floppies and your boot seq. is set up as it should be, just insert DOS in your A: drive on startup and (depending on the version) a few choices will appear. Just select the one that is just a concel (DOS prompt) and all the information should be loaded into memory. If C: isn't currently being used by the HD, then you can access your loaded memory from there. If not, then try D:....

If a partition is already set for the HD, then just type 'Format c:\'... If not, then you will have to set up a partition... To do this, type 'fdisk' and it will ask what you want to do. If there are any partitions on the HD then there should be selection to view exsiting disk partitions. If you select that and nothing is shown, then you will have to make one.

2.) Depending on the system specs, you can go into BIOS and set your boot seq. so that the CD drive is a bootable drive and use Win9x or NT to boot from it. It will partition and format your harddrive but you will need to stand by and give it any needed information that it asks for.


Sorry that I didn't go into much detail. It's been a while since I had to do this on older computers. I usually set up my XP CD as a bootable disk and I just walk it through from there.

There are differences between NTSF, Fat32, and Fat16 (although I'm not even sure if I had ever formatted a HD in Fat16 or if it exsist... it's been a very long time.). Depending on the size of the HD... If since it's an older computer (I'm thinking between 1995 and 1999) then the HD is probably small (under 20 gig). If so, use Fat32 because if you want to run old software that doesn't work in XP, otherwise some of the software will not want to install on a NTSF drive.

To anyone else, if there is something I need to be corrected on, speak up.