Well I have formatted it now and it is a bit fater actually but I still wan''t to format it because everything is very unstructured and I haven''t been very careful with the defragging so I guess it would have been faster if I had done it every now and then from the beginning.

Boot discs doesn''t seem to work so that means I can''t format it, is that correct?

Man, how do I recover data after a format? Got a good doc for that?

Thanks.

if I reformat my hard drive will that fix all the bad sectors that are in the hard drive. My computer is running soooo slow now because I have about 200 bad sectors in my hard drive.

if you reformat your HD, unless you back up data, its gone. Forever. There is NO way to recover the data after you reformat.

Oops.
I just realized that what I wrote in last reply was wrong.
I wrote: "I have just formatted it now" it should be "I have just DEFRAGGED it now". It isn''t formatted yet.

How much percent "fragged" was it? Did it make a difference? Also, DON''T DO ANYTHING WHILE DEFRAGGING!! Once, I was 99% done on my 21 Gig, and i accidentaLLY pressed enter, loaded up a program, and defrager told me it had to restart. LIKE HELL I DID!

Well formating your hard drive is a big step just to free up some space, but if you really want to there are a few good steps too take.

1. Tell Windows 98 to make a boot disk (Might do twice just in case one disk is bad.)

2. Reboot into Dos, you should shutdown, restart and push F8, choose Dos promt mode.

3. Check to see if you have cd-rom support, you will need this later for the reinstallation of Windows.

4. If you do not have cd-rom support, your window's 98 start-up disk should have some, check this first before you format.

5. Now your ready to format, Ask yourself one more time if you really want to do this, if so go on.

6. Type "format c: \s" (The \s tells your system to save its config files and autoexe files so you can start up.)

7. Depending on the size of your hard drive wait for it to finish formatting. Could take awhile.

8. Now its done, pull out your Windows 98 start up disk and put it in to the disk drive.

9. The computer should boot off of the Window 98 start up disk, if it doesn't reboot and push DEL before anything happens, you should come to a blue screen with red white, and yellow text, you have to look around in here and change your promt settings to A,C. Then exit and save.

10. Your almost there, When windows start-up disk starts it will have an all-purpose cd-driver on it, I think it tells you by displaying something like this
1. Start with out CD-Rom support
2. Start with CD-Rom Support
3. Help file (You might want to read this)
You are going to want cd-rom support

11. Now you have to install Windows 98.
A side note, if you go into the D:\win98 dir there is an install there that I think is easier to install, doesn't give you quite the problems the regular one will.

12. Follow the onscreen instructions to finish the install process.

13. Reboot and cross your fingers. Congrats your done.

I had to do this awhile back, but not just to clear space. If you want to just clear some space find all the old files and delete them. It is easier than formatting most of the time, cause there can be unexpected things happen when your formatting. Wow this is the longest post I've ever written. Good luck on formatting.

Glandalf



Edited by - Glandalf on 5/1/00 1:15:48 AM

Formatting HD is a good thing. I''d recommed to do that after every 2nd month, because it''ll clean all crap outta from there and backupping shouldn''t be a problem if you have network or CD-RW. When I clean everything I''ll just move all newest drivers, projects, and all needed files to my 2nd comp and clear everything. It takes only 15-25 minutes to accomplish it and it isn''t that hard...

Time comes, time goes and I only am.