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Reformatting a Hard drive

How to reformat the hard drive?
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rmarotta

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gaestar

OK , to have a bootable disk, go in dos mode and type
SYS a: with a blank disc in drive a ( or with your win 95 startup boot disk )
Do not forget that all your datas will be erased and if the disc you format is the disc where the operating system is (dos, windows,...) you will probably need a driver for your cd rom if you restart in dos mode.
Good luck
Make a Windows 95 startup disk, and make sure you have a CD Rom driver disk for re-install.
If you do not have a CD ROM driver disk, (even if you do have one make sure it contains information, some companies will sell you the CDROM, and not plug in the necessary information onto the disk.  If you see "enter information here" type of text in the CDROM driver files they have not been updated), if you don't have a CDROM dirver disk, just go into your Autoexec.bat and config.sys files.  You can use any kind of text editor to do this (MS notepad)
Look for any file that has CD infformation in it
DEVICECDROM,
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE  /D:IDECD001
DEVICEHIGH=C:\CPQDOS\CPQIDECD.SYS /D:IDECD001

cut and paste all the files to the config.sys, and autoexec.bat files on your boot disk.  
Make sure to place the proper lines in the proper programs (i.e. don't cut the config.sys line and paste it to the autoexec.bat file, keep them in the same file, just on the boot disk, instead of the hard disk.

Give this a test to make sure it is working, try booting from the boot disk and see if you can access your CDROM.

Now you are clear to format your hard drive (if you do not have a boot disk and CDROM drivers you would be unable to reload windows when you are done formating)
Use the format command on the boot disk. from the A:\ (floppy) drive symply type
format C:\

This will format the drive, and allow you a chance to label the drive ( a good idea for orginizational sake) simply type in a name for the drive (less than 11 letters I think)
and you are done, use the boot disk to get to your CDROM drive, and reinstall windows on your new clean hard drive

enjoy!
Who said anything about Windows or CD-ROMs?
I thought he wanted to know how to reformat a hard drive.......

2644 ?

Regards,
Ralph