I wish to do a complete wipe of my hard disk, then reinstall windows98, but, i've got no clue how. I have my boot disk, "system restoration cd (video, modem, mouse, sound, etc drivers) and my windows98 CD. I've heard stuff about "formatting" but, alas, no idea how. Thanks.

if you have a system restoration CD provided by the manufacturer of your computer, most likely it will do all the "dirty work" for you. in general, when you restore from one of these CD's, it returns your computer to the exact same configuration as it had when you got it. i know the Packard-Bell restore CD works this way. it formats the drive and then installs Windows.

yeah, ive used the restoration cd, but it wont clean my entire HD or format the HD. Everything in C:\ is left intact...i want all that gone.

i'm assuming you have a Win98 boot disk and only one primary partition (C:\) for this procedure... make sure you've backed up anything you want to keep. boot with the floppy. when it asks to enable CD-ROM drive support, say yes. at the A:\> prompt, type: format c: /s when it's done and you are back to the A:\> prompt, type: e: (NOTE: for setup purposes, your CD-ROM drive will be "E:\" because of the RAMDrive that is used for the diagnostic tools. once Windows is installed, your CD-ROM will be "D:\") at the E:\> prompt, type: setup that's it. any problems, post back...

It's a LOT better to create at least 2 partitions when you have the chance. Before formatting use FDISK.exe (Read the text files on FDSIK before using it)to set up a logical partition as well as an active partition. This gives you a D: partition that you can 1 COPY your Win OS to D: (WinXX folder on OS CD) 2 Save ALL your personal DATA to this partition. 3 Store ALL your application setup files on D: as well. 4 You can then RUN setup from this partition after re-formatting the C: partition whenever you wish. There are other advantages to this. You can make up to 20 or more different partitions of different sizes. This lets you defrag a LOT easier love is lumatirx http://busker.net/ After