Windows XP

[AKA]

For some reason nobody has mentioned that the XP disc can also remove partitions just like fdisk does.
You dont have to format, you can actually remove partitions, recreate and format.

And no, not even Fdisk will erase the data. Its still recoverable after fdisking the drive.

However if none of your floppys will boot it has nothing to do with the hard drive.
Your floppy drive could still be faulty. Even if it can read in windows that doesn't mean it can boot off a diskette.

But if you want to boot from a Win98 diskette with fdisk on it all you have to do is put in a cd-r, load any cd-r software and make the cd bootable using the Win98 startup diskette or any you choose and boot from the cdrom (however if floppy diskette can't read from bootsector of floppy this will probably not work either). Incidently when you boot from cdrom that way its on A: and the floppy drive becomes B: and any extra content on the cd disc is the next available drive letter after any fat, fat32 or ram drive partitions.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: gpgofast
The link I gave you was wrong. Here is the link to a bootable .ISO image file from Maxtor. You have to run this in DOS I believe. I do understand your paranoia(sp). I returned a laptop last year and used the Maxtor software to write 0's and 1's on the drive before I reformatted and then reinstalled windows and returned the laptop.

SHORTEN THE LINK!!!

It's seriously screwing up the sizing of the entire page.


For the original poster - do you have a floppy drive cleaning kit? I've had read errors already that were solved by cleaning. Those drives can accumulate a lot of dust over the months - I just cleaned a few dust mice (not big enough to be dust bunnies) from a floppy drive I needed to open up.

If you want to make sure your data is gone, use Eraser after your format the drive. If you really really want it gone, use the thing's Gutmann setting - which makes 35 passes over the entire drive, which will take a few days depending on the drive size. I usually just do one pass of pseudorandom data, followed by a pass of zeroes.

Something I thought of - if you have access to another system that has a CD-RW drive, Nero, and a floppy drive, you can make a bootable CD. When you create a new CD project, one of the selections is CD-ROM (boot). If you give it a bootable floppy disk with all the files you want, Nero will make you a bootable CD-RW.