reformatting

Question

Hi all,

My mother is looking to sell her system, and I am looking to find a way to wipe the hard rive clean and reinstall Windows 98se, and any other files that came with the system. I am asking for help in doing this and making it easy to do. I have all the disk for this system and will have no problem installing the system back to shipped condition, just need to know how to zero the hard drive.

The system is a Dimension L500r, Pentium III Processor at 500 MHz

Thank You,

Bandit

Denny Denham · Answer

bandit196538, A discussion of the procedure is here and a list of useful programs is here.

hecate234 · Answer

Do you have the Win 98  Startup Disk that you should have made when you first installed Win 98?  If so, start up the computer with this disk.  It creates a ramdisk and loads a lot of utility programs there, including FORMAT and FDISK.  You are in DOS at this point and can easily format you hard drive.  Just go to the ramdisk, which may be drive D: or later, depending on what other drives are on your system.  Run a dir command to see what is on he drive you are in, and if the correct one, just give the command    formatC:

Denny Denham · Answer

hecate234, While that 'cleans' the hard drive all the information remains on it. If the system being disposed of contains any personal information (passwords, credit card information, and that sort of thing) the information is readily available for retrieval. Overwriting the hard disk is a much safer way to protect sensitive information.

Windows General

reformatting

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