Need help now - How to delete all partitions in hard drive with XP and 98 on it?

[ETan]

I have a hard drive with XP and 98 on different partition. I just sold it so before shipping I want to delete the partitions and let the person have a "clean" drive to work with.

How do I do that? I've been trying for the last hour but couldn't figure it out.

Please help. I need to ship the drive out tomorrow...

thanks.

 

[NicColt]

Just boot with a win98 bottable diskette and fdisk the sucker and delete your partitions. I think that's it.

 

[ETan]

i tried that, but fdisk using win98 bootdisk won't let me delete the ntfs partition...

 

[statetech]

Are you serious? This is very odd since I have always deleted partitions, both FAT and NTFS, via a win98 boot disk.

Consider removing the drive and putting it in another computer to reformat partitions with FAT then boot off of win98 boot disk and remove partitions.

This is the assumption that the computer which you're putting in the hard drive into is win2k or xp since they can format drives to FAT or NTFS.

 

[compudog]

Using FDISK, delete your FAT32 partition, then from the FDISK menu delete the Non-DOS partition. This has always worked for me. I did exactly this on Monday on a totally screwed up dual-boot machine. The user had d/l Kazaa and had XP all screwed up. I FDISKED the drive using the Win98 boot floppy removing the FAT32 and Non-DOS partitions then booted to the WinXP Home (OEM) CD and installed XP. No problems.

 

[NicColt]

>then from the FDISK menu delete the Non-DOS partition

yea I just remembered that, ntfs are non-dos partitions. D'oh...

 

[SaigonK]

Also for the future, go to www.bootdisk.com and get an app called Aefdisk.
it delets ALL partitions, Fat, Fat32, NTFS, Linux and then will also write a new file table.

The great part is that it is only about 30k or so, small enough to fit on a win98 floppy disk.