20th September 2002
Question: I have Windows XP installed on my machine but I am not very pleased with it. How do I format my hard drive so I can put Windows 98 or Windows 2000 on it?
Answer: Well, I am sorry to hear that you are having an unpleasant experience with Windows XP! So you want to format your hard drive and use a different Operating System? No problem! If you want to install Windows 2000, then all you have to do is boot off the Windows 2000 CD (assuming you have a bootable CD-ROM drive). During the installation you have the choice to format the partition, and when this happens, just choose "Yes." I personally would go one step further and use the same window to delete my partition and recreate it. As for going to Windows 98 from Windows XP, that can be a little trickier. It depends on what file system your Windows XP installation was using, NTFS or FAT32. Technically, you can use a boot disk to format both, but if your Windows XP machine was running NTFS, then I would personally recommend that you repartition your hard drive. The easiest way to make a bootable install disk for Windows 98 is to make it from another Windows 98 machine. On another Windows 98 machine, go to Start | Settings | Control Panel | Add or Remove Programs and choose the Startup Disk tab (should be the last tab). Just insert a blank floppy in the floppy drive and click "Create disk." Once you have created your boot disk, just put it in your Windows XP machine and reboot. After booting from the floppy disk, you should be left at a command prompt, where at you can type "format c:" (sans quotes) and press Enter to format your hard drive. If you want to repartition your hard drive, then you will need to type "fdisk" (sans quotes) and press Enter. Just follow the menus to delete the non-DOS partition and then create a Primary DOS partition. Once you have repartitioned the hard drive, you can follow the steps above to format the hard drive. After you format the drive, run Windows 98 setup by typing "D:\setup" (sans quotes) and press Enter. Make sure to replace D with the drive letter of your CD-ROM drive. Maybe now you will have a little less operating system frustration.