I purchased a used pc.. it is a P3 600/128 running windows 98. It has a 60G hard drive. I continually had problems with it. Something was using system resources, I could never find what it was. Finaly I just wiped the hard drive. I used fdisk, because I could see that there was a copy of win2000 somewhere on the HD that I couldnt find. (on startup it would say press F11 to run win2000) when I would do this it would say that it wasnt all there or something to that effect. In any case I fdisk'ed ... deleting all partitions and tried using just one. (dont know if this is bad or good, I am not at all pc savvy : ) It worked, I then formated. Format worked. I then tried to re-install windows. I changed the bios setting to run cd rom first.. and windows setup started. About half way through I recieved an error message that said windows install had failed.. it gave me a warning not to reconfigure anything. My question is.. without tossing the flippin thing off of my balcony, how can I end my pc's reign of terror over me? Thanks for any help you can offer, you are probably saving some passerby below me a bonk on the head : ) darla

What was the exact error saying.not sure i can help but knowing the error messge would help

well as to the exact error message the first time, I cant remember why it said windows failed. But now, it says that there is a copy of windows already on my computer and that I should exit setup. How can there be a copy of windows on my computer if I fdisk'd? Which leads me to another question. After I had performed fdisk and format, when restarting it STILL said to hit f11 for win2000. And I deleted all partitions! Do you think that it is reading the part of the failed install? thank you! Darla

Yeah, it's hard to tell without knowing the specific message. But the 98 version of fdisk can only see a hard drive up to about 64 gig. As I understand it, if yours is more than that it will only partition the difference. So a 65 gig drive, for example, would be partitioned as a 1 gig. There's an upgrade on microsoft's site or you can use the ME version of fdisk. You also might run fdisk again to make sure the win2000 partitions are gone. Sometimes fdisk won't remove NTFS partitions. If they're still there you may need to use something like delpart.

You posted while I was composing. To remove the win2000 boot options, running fdisk/mbr might do it. Otherwise you can use a zero fill utility to erase the entire drive. That boot option is outside the partition area, so removing the partitions usually won't remove it.

Also what i do when i have a HD i need to wipe clean i goto goggle and find a small program called Delpart.exe you should be able to download it onto the same floppy you use for your boot floopy just boot up with the boot floopy you have and at the comand prompt run the Delpart program it only takes a secound and it should remove everything on the Hd win2000 is kind of hard to remove from a HD i think but Delpart should do the trick then Fdisk again and format to your fresh HD hope this helps

You can find Delpart here, http://www.mesich.com/freeware.html Greetz from The Netherlands, The Count