I am afraid to format my hard drive because I dont wonna lose system files and drivers that I might need and other such things, is their a way I could go about doing this? If so please tell me thanks for you time, ~ZoRb~

formatting will lose everything on the hard drive. No exceptions. Why don't you let us know why you think you need to format your drive? Once formatted, a drive shouldn't need to be formatted again unless the FAT tables become error ridden.

correction, what I meant to say was that formatting will erase everything on that partition. If a hard drive has several partitions, then formatting one partition will not affect the other partitions.

G'day ZoRb, there is a How To button at the top of this page [advanced] that will give you a rough idea on what to do and what to have. If you have 98 you should have a boot disc to access your Cd-rom but your normal drive letter might temporarily change to the next letter with this disc. And yes the first time can be scary, it was for me as I had a reason to be, I didn't know about the file MSCDEX.exe [in 95] then and ended up getting it 'fixed' at the shop after being 'locked' out of Windows for a week and no-one to help me, but I learned quick after that.

Why do you want to format your drive? If you do format the drive, then the only way to 'save/preserve' files/drivers.etc... is to back-up those files; or to 'copy' them somewhere safe... If the system files are for an OS/application, then if you have the OS/appllication installation CD's you will still have them when you re-install the OS...; drivers are usually either within the OS files, on supplied CD/floppies, or more current versions on the appropriate web-site - but check first... As Preston remarks, formatting a partition will destroy all info on that partition only... But again, why do you want to format the drive? More info from you means more useful/appropriate advice from folks here?

I know this is sort of different, but how can I get my win98 system to read a previously winNT formated drive so that I can format it for fat32

First off is it really necassary for you to format your hard drive. I would suggest you buy a Tape streamer or Jazz disk or even nowadays a Cd writer - and back up your data! The real reasons for formatting a hard drive is 1. You have a virus 2. You have bad sectors 3.Your putting a new operating system on.