i want to format my 120gb hard drive and i would like to know what would be the best way to do that? i am doing this so i can install win xp again on the formatted drive. please include some details so i can follow them? thanks. Jason

Hi Jason, To the left on this screen, 4th up from the bottom is the header, "Install Guides". This is an excellent info source, just choose XP. The main thing is to start with a totally clean disk, nothing on it. The majority of folks who have XP installation problems start with either upgrades or old partitions on their disks. That means you must boot with a WIN98 floppy, type Fdisk [return], and remove all partitions, extended partitions and logical drives. Finally fdisk should message you that there are no partitions on the disk. Okay, now pop-out the floppy and insert your XP CDROM and reboot. The CD should fire up and start the install process. Okay, at this point you want to decide if you want to dual-boot with two operating systems, or just make two partitions, or just one large single partition for XP. Remember, after you are done, you cannot reset partitions or change them unless you wipe the disk and start over. In fact, this is an excellent time to practice setting partitions, removing them, re-setting them, etc. You can't hurt anything because the disk is wiped anyway. Practice both with the WIN98 boot floppy as well as the XP disk. Set up a dual-boot with XP, then wipe the disk again and set up the way you want. The knowledge you gain will put you miles ahead of most people. After you have done it, you will wonder why you ever thought it was so hard. It isn't! Any further questions, just post back.

Win98 fdisk has a problem with drives over 64gb. See below: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q263044

Jason: I suggest you boot from the XP install CD and use the options during the install process to partition and format the hard drive.

Jason, from my own long experiences with windows OS's I suggest you make more than one super big partition. Most important, if you use one partition only for windows and the drivers for your hardware you can easily make a backup image of that partition so you can reinstall that backup when your system goes down for what reason ever. Around 6 GB should be enough! But if you do that you have to take a close look at the installation path of every software you install because nearly everything automatically wants to go to C:\Programs\*****. Yopu just have to change into the correct driveletter. I also suggest to make an extra partition for your own file so you can also make an easy backup of them! You can also move the Own Files folder to that partition through the properties of the folder! It's hard to make suggestion about sizes and number of partition without knowing exactly what you want to do but here is what I have on my computer: C: Windows XP about 8 GB (C: Windows ME about 5 GB --- Dual boot) D: Programs about 8 GB --- no games here! E: Own Data about 8 GB --- additional older drive - full size F: CD-RW 1 GB --- another old drive - use it only to put files together befor I burn them on CD G: + F: Games both 16 GB H: Big Files about 73 GB Because of the dual boot with WinME I still use fat32 partitions and thats the reason I split up the games partition. With over 16 GB fat32 uses 32 kb clusters and that means very big loss of space because every small file uses at least 1 cluter of 32 kb and games tend to have very many small files! The Big Files partition is for backups of the C:, D: and E: partitions (I use partition omage and drive image) and bigger files such as mp3, videos and so on (as the files here all have a couple of MB and more the loss with the big clusters is not so important!). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you don't want to do mulitple boot you can use the new NTFS partitions from XP. They don't have the problems with the cluster sizes so you can make one big partition of the rest of your drive. Still I suggest to have differen partitions for your OS (drivers included), Programs (no games) and your own Data. If you use a drive image software regularly on those three partitons you should be quite secure if you have a system crash because you can restore your last working backup and have a running system again. A drive crash is still fatal as long as you don't have a way to bring the backup to another drive! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That's they way my own system runs quite good for over three years, even after a couple of problems and crashes. I hope that helps a bit!

One quick thing I found out about NTFS formatting... if you are on a network (whether a company network or a home network) any computer without NTFS formatting won't be able to see your hard drive. So... unless you have no intention of ever putting your computer on a network, or unless you are sure your networks computers use NTFS, DONT format with NTFS. If the 98 boot disk won't work on a drive that big, the 98SE might. You can download and create several different OS boot disks (including DOS and all Win versions) here: http://bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

hwood has the right approach to formatting: use the XP cd. Why mess with the extra steps of a 98 boot disk when the XP cd will do it all - deletion of old partitions, formatting, etc. WhizWannaBe, Win2k and XP can see NTFS partitions even if they are installed on FAT32 partitions. Win95, 98, and ME cannot see or be installed on NTFS. IMHO, the only disadvantage to NTFS is if you need to see it from Win98, etc. HTH