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Please help me with my going on 3 day reformating project!

A

andyjz

Member
I've been trying to reformat for two days now. I've reformatted four times now and still have problems. First of all I've been using fdisk because I don't have the use of my mouse for some reason when I boot my IBM drive guide disk do you know why? It boots just fine with my other computer.

Can someone give me a step by step talk through wiping the drive reformating and installing win 98.

Ive tried deleting all the partions and then making 1 big 30 GB drive with the make primary dos partition. I've used format C: and format C: /s both. The last time I reformatted everything seemed to go alright but when I check the drive size from within windows it says it was only 2 GB. So I booted with the boot disk and in fdisk looked at the drive status it said it was fat32 so why did it only allow for 2GB. It said that it was formating 29.xx GB when i did format c:

Please help I am completly stuck! I'll be right here waiting for suggestions. I guess I'll try wiping the CMOS next.

 
Go into the BIOS and set the boot from CD put your 98CD in the cdrom drive and boot the machine check the :start computer with CD rom support. Follow the instructions on the screen. It will Format - FDISK from the CD. After win 98 is up and running dont forget to set the boot sequence back to C:
Bleep
 
I just did what was said and I still get only 2GB of space.

Please help I can't afford to take this thing in.
 
There are a couple of things you didn't say that may make a difference. Are you by any chance using a mouse that requires special drivers -- such as an optical IR mouse? If so connect an older serial or PS2 mouse since you are only going to have generic drivers in the bootup disks autoexec file.
I have just installed an IBM 75GXP 30Meg drive. Did you get to a screen saying your system supports large drives and asking if you want to enable LBA -- which you do?
FDISK should report the raw size of the drive. Is it reporting the correct size? You should have set the drive detection to auto in the Standard CMOS setup screen -- instead of specifying cylinders, heads etc. I don't know which MB you have, but in the bootup, if you have set the drive detection to AUTO, you should get the right drive size reported.

In FDISK click on the partition mapping information to see what it is seeing. You will want to delete all partitions until you are getting the entire drive space reported as free space and then click on create new partition. It should give you the option of putting all of the space in a single partition. I know this isn't what you want, but go ahead and see if you can create a partition with all of the free space in it. You should be able to.

If you can't do this, then I suspect that you have somehow created a partitionsuch as NTFS that can't be seen. In that case you will need to get the use of Partition Magic long enough to delete this (or these) partition(s) so that the whole disk is seen by FDISK as free space.

PS I hope you didn't use the Maxtor MaxBlast disk. They use an overlay scheme that is invisible to anything except the modified MicroHouse drivers they have. Partition Magic will still get you out of trouble in that case, but FDISK won't.
 
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