Can you walk me through a format/re-install of W98?

[mac4lou]

Guys,
I was trying to help a friend but something went waaaaay wrong. He did a format and I was going to help him but he was showing C and D drives. He said he wanted only 1 drive/partition so I deleted one of the partitions that said it was non-DOS with fdisk. We then did another format but now I can't get his W98 to install. It hangs up at the beginning of 98 setup. When I check partitions with fdisk it shows 1 partition (C) but 82% usage. My question is: Can someone walk me through an entire format (so he has only 1 drive) and re-install of W98? He didn't have a boot disk so we're using one from my machine, does that have anything to do with it. His PC is a PIII/450, 128 MB, 10.2 Gb. Thanks for any help or recommendations.
Lou.

 

[lumberg]

You need to delete all partitions using fdisk, then create one big one. Make sure you use a Win98 or95b boot disk. If the drive is larger than 2gig, you must use FAT 32 to format the drive. FAT has a limit of 2gig (may be the reason it shows 82% usage:Q). When running fdisk the first thing it should ask you is if you want to "enable large disk support". Answer yes, this will use FAT 32, answering no will use FAT.
1. boot to the disk, then -> fdisk
2. delete all partitions
3. create one large partition, make the new partition active, exit from fdisk and reboot
4. boot to the disk, then -> format c:
5. if the bios supports booting from the cdrom, then do so
otherwise you should have a boot disk with cdrom support
6. run setup from the cdrom
you should be good to go...

 

[mac4lou]

Thanks for the info.
One question, though. After deleting partitions and making one partition, what has to be done to make that partition active?
Thanks again.
Lou.

 

[IamDavid]

If ya only have one partition you don't have to set it. It will automaticly be active.

 

[billandopus]

Partition Magic 6 rocks the house for your particular application. Just make the 2 PM disks and you are ready to go. You can delete, merge, make active partitions and the whole bit. Just a thought ...

 

[lumberg]

If you do have multiple partitions, then there is an option while running fdisk that can set the partition the active. I believe it's option 2.

 

[stEVIL]

Hiyaz
How do ya go about putting a partition for your swap file and how big do ya make it?
Thnx