Disk formatting and "Fdisk"

[Ace]

Ok I need to format my drive but I'm not quite sure how to. I know I need to make a boot disk but will my cd rom still function after I format, or will I need to put the rom driver on a 3.5 as well?

[Kolar]

If your using XP just put the cd into your cd-rom and reboot. There will be a screen saying boot from cd, hit any key. You can quick format with NTFS and then reinstall windows right after. XP will install most if not all drivers for you. For 9x you can reboot with a boot disk, format and install windows. You will be prompted to install the drivers after you do a fresh install or wait till your in windows by canceling the driver windows. One thing you should do is back up any drivers that you know are not easy to find since the ethernet driver might not auto install leaving you without the option to use the net.

[Ace]

The reason I am reformatting is to make my master physical drive one drive I have 1 with 2 partitions and another .......

[Kolar]

on ibm compatible machines (ie intel, amd...etc) boot from a win98 floppy and fdisk all the partitions away. I don't know if you will lose all the information on the disk because I have never really done it before but I am betting you will.

Windows XP also has a delete partition option from the setup but from reading about it, it looks like you will lose all information with this option.

[Arc-lite]

Originally posted by Kolar
on ibm compatible machines (ie intel, amd...etc) boot from a win98 floppy and fdisk all the partitions away. I don't know if you will lose all the information on the disk because I have never really done it before but I am betting you will.

Windows XP also has a delete partition option from the setup but from reading about it, it looks like you will lose all information with this option.

Deleting a partition deletes EVERYTHING, regarless of what you use to do it. Personally, I like having 2 partitions on one drive. It makes reformatting a lot easy, and I can save stuff I don't want deleted.

[Ace]

I will exapnd again, my systems drive is way to small and so I keep getting the warning about how I have to little drive space...... I have like 50 mbs free on my system drive. So if I make that drive all one drive then the problem should go away. I also have another hard drive that I can transfer stuff on to and wont have to worry about losing any thing.

[Kolar]

If your asking how can you delete the partition , you have to give us some info about your computer. Your operating system is what really matters here. For XP boot with the XP disc and delete the partition which will also format it , if it doesn't reformat you can do that from the XP disc too. On a 95/98 machine use a boot disk, do fdisk on the command line and it should work.

Transfer the install driver for your Cd-rom to the 2nd hard drive ( assuming your not formating it). All your drivers are kept with windows and formating will wipe it out, but after reinstalling windows on your system drive you can use that install file on the 2nd HDD to put the driver back on.

I hope this helps. You really need to state your problem better in the future .