Reformatting a hard drive?

K

kernan

I don't know if the thread name is the proper terminology for what I want to do. Here is my situation:

This weekend I had a meltdown on one of my older Dell's. Error messages, problems booting up, lost my connections to the internet because some files were corrupt. I took it to a local store who told me the best thing to do was back up my data, re-install Windows 2000, and then put my data back on. Sounded good to me.

I picked up my machine today, got home and booted up. What the guy actually did was install Windows 2000 on my hard drive AGAIN - so now I have two instances. The first one, which still does not work properly, and the second one, which is the new install. This sucks, one reason being now I have no room on my hard drive because I have two OS's on there, and everything that entails.

So, I want to just wipe everything out (I have all my data backed up, so this is not a problem), install Windows 2000 from scratch, re-load all my drivers (I can download them from Dell's site), and be done with it.

The question is - how do I do this? Is this reformatting the HD? Can someone point me to a site if it is too complicated to talk about here.

Any and all help is appreciated!!!
 
Quote from jiacopel85:

I just reformatted the HD on one of my old computers last week. It's not very difficult, just create a boot disk and follow this site: http://tech.jmwebdesigns.com/software/expert/reformat.html step by step.
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Excellent site - thanks for sharing. It specifically talks about Win 95/98. Do you know if the procedure is the same for 2000? I will try it this weekend and find out, but just checking for input from anyone before I begin trial and error.

Thanks again.
 
The nice thing about Win2K and Windows XP is that they have bootable versions of the CD-ROM. What's more, when you set up your hard drive partitions, it will ask you if you want to reformat or keep the partition in tact. At that juncture, of course, you'll want to reformat. After that, the install kicks off and you should hopefully just sit back and watch.

One thing to keep in mind, make sure you have downloaded drivers for all of your hardware (and have the driver disks). For example, if you use broadband and you have a network card that isn't supported under Windows 2000 out of the box, how are you going to get that driver? I've installed operating systems 100's if not 1000's of times and I still get bit by that every once in a while ... hehe.

Best of luck.
 
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