[Gnossos]

Hello,

I need help formatting my old Dell's hard drive. I have no information of any value on it and just want it cleaned. I have all of the driver and utilities disks. I did format it once before... 2 or 3 years ago (it's about 4 years old now). It's running Windows 98. When I put in the disk for formatting (the way I did before) and type Y when it prompts me I get a message that the formatting process was cancelled. Please help. Thank you in advance.

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What brand of drive is it? Go to the disk mfrs. website and download software to do what you want. If it's a Maxtor, Dell uses them alot, you can get PowerMax to low level format, that is write the drive to zeros, and also run diagnostics. You can get MaxBlast4 to partition and format it to your liking.

[Tyger]

What brand of drive is it? Go to the disk mfrs. website and download software to do what you want. If it's a Maxtor, Dell uses them alot, you can get PowerMax to low level format, that is write the drive to zeros, and also run diagnostics. You can get MaxBlast4 to partition and format it to your liking.

[Gnossos]

How do I find out what the manufacturer is? And what is a low-level format? I just want to return it to factory condition. Thanks for the help.

[Tyger]

How do I find out what the manufacturer is? And what is a low-level format? I just want to return it to factory condition. Thanks for the help.

I'm a little confused here, when you say factory condition do you mean a reinstallation of the operating system, or just removing everything from the disk to protect your privacy? If you just want to blank the disk restart in ms-dos mode (won't work for winME) and type in

format C: /s

and hit enter and it should format the disk and erase the OS and all files. It will boot up because you have the command.com file on it, and you can use your boot disk to start the computer with cd-rom support and reinstall everything.

[Gnossos]

No, I want it to be like when i got the computer from dell. Turn it on and windows starts. I'm also kind of retarded as far as computer lingo goes, so if you could put everything in like... retard terms that would be awesome. Thanks again.

[Tyger]

Just go to the top of this forum where is says do a clean install, they spell it out really well.