if you want you can reformat, and partiton the drive with tools currently included in Windows 98. you will need a floppy disk. if you do not have any floppys disk's then you can make a bootable CD. there is alot of variables involved with doing this, for a beginner to computers, and not knowing what type of hardware you purchased, does not make is simpler. If you can rule out incompatibilites of the hardware, it would be alittle smoother going.
first, download the tool here
CPUID, it will tell you which CPU you have installed, the type of RAM as well. always good to know for other things, such as software requirements, or to check if you got ripped on the CPU. Windows does not give you the CPU speed, but it will tell you the type of CPU installed, it if is aware of it. Due to the newness of the current CPU i purchased recently, i have not found any new OS's that have recognized the CPU i have. Since i purchased a Athlon XP 2500 with Barton core, most will point out it being an UNKNOWN CPU. But i do know what i have. It can not determine my CPU, even though the Athlon XP CPU has been out for a while, mostly due to the change in cache size, the barton core... anyways.
you will need to make a bootdisk in windows. go to the
CONTROL PANEL,
ADD\REMOVE SOFTWARE and make a bootdisk, it will ask for the Win98 CD.
When finished, go to the
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND folder, find the files named
format, and
fdisk, you can copy them over to the floppy, just drag n drop if you have to, or select each file ( both at the same time) and right click, and select the option
SEND TO, and then select the 3 1/2 Floppy A: drive.
FDISK, will partition the HardDrive
FORMAT will format the hard drive.
when you boot the computer with the floppy drive, you want to pick the option [/b]WITH CD ROM SUPPORT[/b], then once you have booted all up. you will be presented with a flashing
A: prompt. You will type commands here.
Before you do anything. you will want to make sure that the CD ROM is acessible, when the system boots up, read the onscreen output, it will tell you IF the cdrom was detected and if the drivers were loaded. Plus you will need to know the drive letter, if you have 4 partitions, counting from C drive, you will have partitions C,D,E,F for the harddrive, and G for the CD-rom. But that is not always the case, it depends on if the bootdisk loads a RAMDRIVE, which could possibly be letter G: or H:. thus changing postion of the CD drive.
this is why you need to go through all the motions, but dont do anything yet.
you can verify the information on each drive by going through each one, just to make certain you find the CD_ROM drive. to do this you need to change from the
A: floppy to the harddrive partitions, you can do this simply by typing the letter of drive you want to change to. So if you are presently on the
A:, and wish to change over to the
C:, you will simply type "
C: ", no quotes, and press enter.
then the prompt should change over to
C:, showing you that your now in the
C: drive, then for each letter, you do the same.
To view the contents on each drive, you type "
dir", which will show you all the file's names. plus whatever volume names you named each drive. you can add extra switches to the commands such as
"
dir /w", which will display the contents in a wide format, usually since some folders have alot of content, and the screen scrolls very fast by, you need to either stop or slow the display down , so you can view it all. then you will do this "
dir /p", which tells the command, after each screen full of names, PAUSE. then to resume to next screen, hit any key. rem, no quotes.
when you located the cd-rom drive, by either knowing which drive it is, or by guessing, you should hear and see the drive doing something, take note of the letter.
then you will switch back to the
A: drive. by typing "
A:" - no quotes.
the frist item you want to run will be the
fdisk command. you can run through it just to look it over.
Since you will not be making partitions, just removing the 4 back down to a single partiton, it will be much simpler for you. as you will just be deleting partitons, most likely you will want to view the partitions in the extended partion, and delete them - then create a single primary partition.
after you make the single primary partition, you will want to make it bootable. then you reboot the computer, keep the floppy disk in still when it reboots, this time you will be running the
format program. so once all back to the
A:, you will type - no quotes - "
format c: /s".
the switch "
/s" will tell the format program to make it a system disk, and to load the necessary DOS system files.
then after all this, you can reboot again, load system back up with bootdisk, this time at the A: prompt you will want to switch over to your CD-ROM drive which contains the Windows ME OS. and execute the program "
setup".
Now, this is the long long way to do it. it is possible that your computer can boot off the CD, therefore making things alot quicker to do. But since i dont know what sort of system you have. I will give you the way it has been done for a long time.
you may want to look up these commands on the net, to become alittle more familiar with em.
if you want to try the commands, you can learn alittle about the abilities when you type the command, such as
FDISK, by simply using the help switch
/?, which would be like this "
FDISK /?"
Free Paritioning Tools here (previous thread)