Hi. I just got a seond hand HD from a computer show. When I got home, and tried to install it, my computer said that the drive was NTFS, not FAT32. How can I format if for FAT32 from within widows? any ideas? Please help, I am not too computer literate.

Are you using it as second harddrive or brand new one? if its NTFS formatted chances are its got winNT on it too....

If you use it as second harddrive its easier with DOS just use the format command...

I cant go into the details, since I never had to format anything bigger than a floppy :P

There is a little bit more to this than can be explained in here. Some issues that you need to address include any jumper settings that need to be changed on BOTH of your hard drives. Your 1st HDD will need to have it's jumpers set as the "Master" drive. Your 2nd HDD (the one you bought) will have to be set as a slave. Once you get this taken care of and the drive installed you will need to set it up in your BIOS (Head Cylinders Sectors) so that your machine will know how to "Talk" to it. Once you have all this done - you will need to boot to DOS and run FDISK. After doing this you will be able to format the drive. If you do not know how to use the FDISK program (I assume you don't) post back to me and I'll explain further... dinner is ready and I've got to go!!! Good Luck!

G'day Dia Ma, I was gonna answer this first but waited till others did to see what they say as I'm not at all familiar with NT. It seems to me that you have to remove the NT partition from the second HD using NT's version of Fdisk first then create the Dos partiton using the Win95/98 Fdisk on the second HD, you should be able to download the NT one from somewhere [it's not at Bootdisk.com, I just checked].

When you use Fdisk [for Dos] make sure you select the [5] option and enter fixed disk no.2 for your second drive or you could accidentally wipe out number 1 HD.

Also check the How To section at this site on P&F'ing if you are not to sure about it all and maybe also the NT forum as well.

Hope I helped

Correction, the NT boot disk is at www.bootdisk.com [look under Networking-NTfaq].

sorry 'bout that.

FYI, WHEN YOU FORMAT YOUR DRIVE IF THIS IS TO BE YOUR BOOTUP DRIVE MAKE SUR YOU FORMAT USINNG FORMAT C; /S SO YOU WILL HAVE DOS TO LOAD YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM ONTO IT!

Ronnie's right, you need to delete the NTFS partition. Of course you can use the NT installation disks to do this, but you can also use fdisk on Win98 (assuming that is, there's only one partition on the new disk - if there are more, you'll need the NT installation disks.)

When you start fdisk (answer "yes" when it asks if you want to enable large disk support), it will show the NTFS partition on your new disk as a "Non-DOS partition." Simply delete it (choice 3), then create a new one. Then exit fdisk and format your new drive.

A: load previous drive with all upgrades at microsoft.com to get the bootsectors from a y2k upgraded system ...the last upgrade will tell you to do this Im saving you the trouble of reading all this crap.now after you run fdisk remove all partitions make sure no partitions of any kind exist run a disk manager if you have one and use the startup disk you made from the other h.d the one that was upgraded at microsoft.com upgrades if you dont have a disk manager u can use fdisk but make sure u boot it with the startup disk u made and it will set a partition this will get u to the operating system make sure u boot from a: then from a : type format c:/s this will get u a format it will now boot to c: 2load dos load cd rom drivers if system dose not boot from d: 3 load windows when your all good to go go back to dos and remove the cd rom drivers in dos they will be in the autoexec and config.sys just what the driver installation put in .now your done this step removes the 16 bit drivers from your 32 bit system this will give you a stable machine

hi
i would like to know how to format a hard drive step by step for windows 98