Repartitioning a drive and installing OS....

I had windows 95 on my old compaq presario, and wanted to put windows 98 on. I have one, 8.0 GB hard drive in the computer, which for some reason is partitioned to look like 4, 2.0gb drives. I rebooted into DOS, did format C:, and formatted the C. But the c is only 1/4 of the hard drive. I can I make it so it looks at though its only one hard drive? (info: Its a seagate, and when I start the computer, it says "starting ontrack, seagate technology, dynamic drive overlay"), then it asks if I want to boot from diskette, hard drive (invalid system disk), or cdrom (need to install drivers first).

Im not sure how to get into the bios on the comupter. And I'm assuming I need a boot disk (www.bootdisk.com), but I just want to make the 4 seperate drives back into one, and do a clean install of windows 98.

Thanks

Boot up to dos and use fdisk to handle partitions.
This article should help you use fdisk.

Also try this article.

Use a DOS bootdisk, zap all the partitions, make a new one and then format/install windows.

FAT16 can only handle up to 2Gig drives, thats why your drive is split.

David

When you format a partition or a drive to install your OS, you have to use this command line:

FORMAT C: /S

The "s" tells that this is going to be the bootable system disk. You won't be able to boot into Windows without it.

Also, you don't need to use a boot floppy when installing Win98. Just insert your CD, restart and select the option to boot from the CD. Then go through the rest of the OS installation.


BHD

BaldHeadedDork said:

When you format a partition or a drive to install your OS, you have to use this command line:

FORMAT C: /S

The "s" tells that this is going to be the bootable system disk. You won't be able to boot into Windows without it.

Also, you don't need to use a boot floppy when installing Win98. Just insert your CD, restart and select the option to boot from the CD. Then go through the rest of the OS installation.
BHD

Click to expand...

He said he has an old Compaq. Most old systems don't have BIOS support for CD-ROM boots. The /s switch won't be necessary. Floppy boot with a good 98 boot floppy with CD-ROM drivers from www.bootdisk.com will get the CD-ROM up to read the 98 install CD. a:\ Fdisk c:, Format (FAT32), cd <CD drive letter>:, then at the prompt key SETUP and hit enter will fire up the installation. The CD drive letter might get pushed up a letter due to the creation of a virtual ram drive.

Test out the 98 floppy boot disk first by booting up with it before wiping out your 95 installation. If you can see the 98 install files on the CD, you're good to go. If you use the bootdisk.com boot image, also print out the instructions they have on their site ahead of time.

I've already delt with this issue on an old PPro200 and a 486DX2/66.

BaldHeadedDork said:

When you format a partition or a drive to install your OS, you have to use this command line:

FORMAT C: /S

The "s" tells that this is going to be the bootable system disk. You won't be able to boot into Windows without it.

Click to expand...

Umm yes you can install and boot just fine without the /s

format /s just puts the DOS boot information on the disk (floppy or hard) which isn't necessary if you're going to install Windows on the hard disk anyway. Windows will put it's necessary boot information the hard disk itself.