I’m planning to format my 4Gb hard drive, but I’ve never formatted a hard disk before! I read the article titled ‘How to partition and reformat your hard drive’ in the ‘Advanced How Tos’ section, but have a few questions before I jump in the deep end. 1. What disks should I have before I start? Will I need anything else apart from the 4 standard ‘Windows 2000 Setup Boot Disks’? If so, where do I get these from? 2. Should the prompts (from the article above) be entered in Command prompt after I have started my PC, or in DOS mode itself? 3. After I format the C:/ I plan to re-install Win2k (I have CD). When the hard disk has no OS installed, will installation of Win2k begin automatically once the CD is inserted, or is there a prompt for this also? I’ll be sooo grateful if someone can help! Thanx peeps ;)

You can format the hard drive as part of the install process - win2k's install has tools for this. All you need to do is boot from the win2k install CD (quicker than using boot floppies) - you'll need to set your bios to boot with CD as first boot device. Once loaded, the install process will ask you where you want to install 2k - and display list of existing partitions on the drive(s). Just select any there and use the D key to delete (and answer warning prompts that follow correctly). Now, when all gone, use the C key to create a new partitiion for your installation. Choose NTFS or FAT32 when asked, then install should proceed.

Help much appreciated, ty!!