In brief: PII - 350. 8.4GB HD. Need to reformat/Fdisk. 1) Do I need to "Fdisk"? Or can I get away with only doing "Format C:"? 2) If I do "Format C:", do I need the "/s". This computer has only ever had the C: drive on it and the full 8.4gb HD was assigned to it. Originally, years back, I had Win95. ------ Not knowing much about "Drive Space", I will add this bit of info. Perhaps it's nothing to worry about. My "Drive Space3" says that 1) The drive is not compressed 2) Shows a full pink pie chart with 2.0gb UNUSED and 0gb used. **My harddrive is 8.4gb. but When I open "My Computer" and right click on the "C" drive, the pie chart shows used space of 561mb and FREE space of 7.31gb (**again, HD is 8.4gb. Any info would be most useful. Thanks!

The HD is formatted to FAT16. You really need to format. As long as you never had NTFS on it you don't need to Fdisk. Format with Large disk support.

Don't know anything about Drive Space 3. The name Drive Space usually refers to a drive compression scheme used by Windows. I would tend to believe the space indicated by the Properties display rather than a third party program that may be old enough not to recognize more than 2GB. If you consider that the advertised capacity of a drive is usually the raw, unformatted capacity then you can add the sizes shown in Properties and multiply by 1.024, to raise it to the base used by Windows, allow a little for the formatting process and you pretty much have the 8.4GB you expect.

"Format with Large disk support" Large disk support applies to fdisk, not format.

Getting back to your questions..... 1) There is no need to fdisk the drive unless you want to change the partitions. Format is fine by itself. 2) The /s switch transfers the system files, making the drive bootable. If this is a slave drive, it doesn't need to be bootable. If it is the primary master & will contain your operating system, it isn't necessary to use the /s switch, because Windows setup will sys the drive anyway, but it won't do any harm, either. If this is a laptop with swappable floppy & CD, you'll need to sys the HD so that you can shut it down, swap the floppy for the CD, & reboot to the HD. By the way, systems with low memory can often get an error message when doing a format /s command. To avoid the error, do the format(.com) & sys(.com) as separate operations. HTH Dave

Drive Space shows 2GB for all drives of 2GB and larger. Checking drive properties through "My Computer" is accurate. Windows is recognizing the whole drive and your drive is partitioned for FAT32. Why do you need to format?

Oh boy, Now I'm supposed to make sense of all this?? 1) Chris: Yes, Drive Space is a compression utility. Someone had me look there for usage of my C: drive and that's when I realized how different it was from getting the same information thru "My Computer". 2)Brown: The drive IS formatted for FAT32. Or at least that's what I'm told when I look at the properties thru "My Computer". 3)Dave, I need to reformat b/c I committed the great cardinal sin. I restored an old registry to try and fix a faux pas with Outlook Express. Too long and involved to go into here, but I am fully prepared to do the Reformat. In truth, I did a reformat the other night. No problem whatsoever. And the system is running much faster. But, I'm still having great problems with OE. The installed version (with Win98SE) was 5.0. I even upgraded to 5.5 hoping the problems would clear themselves, but NOPE... no such luck. So, it was recommended to me to FDISK and reformat from there. I was thinking of just Reformatting and NOT Fdisking! **Question: Should I proceed with Fdisk and partition my harddrive so that the O/S can go on one drive and the data on another? (am I even asking the question correctly?!). Thanks everyone (Dan and Dave too) for your help and input. I'm really just plain puzzled as to why my OE refuses to cooperate. I'll post a separate question and thread. For here, I'm more interested in knowing whether to Fdisk or skip that and do the Format C option. Again, thanks! --Nikki