Formating Hard Disk

[Jastiv]

Right now I have Xp installed and activated. I have a large C: disk with Fat32 on it in addition to 4 old SCSI disks. i would like to do a complete wipe of the system and reinstall from scratch, starting with a dos-games compatable set up with win98 and eventually making a double or triple boot system of 98/xp/Mandrake or 98/Mandrake. How do I format my C: drive?

I finnally got my entire stubborn family to back up everything, but now they are mad because Everything isn't set up instantly. Also, I backed up a bunch of AOL files on text and word documents. I put them in a folder on the SCSI hard disk F Then the folder completly disappered. It was not in the recycle bin or anything and I do not remmber deleting it. Noone said they deleted it either. I wonder if I have a big virus or something and should reformat the SCSI disks as well.

[ntt.]

If you install windows 98 first then you can use DOS's fdisk program to format a partition on the hard disk for windows 98 and leave the rest blank. You can then fill up some of the remaining space with XP if you wish, and finally tell Mandrake to use whatever is left. The Mandrake disk partitioning tool is quite easy to use, but it is a little flakey and if you're familiar with DOS fdisk, I'd advise you to use that.

If you're worried about viruses, you can get a free online scan from places like here (http://housecall.antivirus.com/pc_housecall/).

[Jastiv]

I tried to reinstall windows 98, but it would not let me because the xp system was already in the drive, so I need to wipe the hard drive blank.

[lrhogusa]

Never thought about a triple boot.

Right now the only thing I can think of is one of those selector switches that will give you a choice of starting any of your hard drives.

If you got 2 drives you could have WinXP on one and dual boot WIN98/Linux on the other or whatever combination you chose.

I have dual boot of WINXP and RH7.1 with WIN4LIN doing WIN98. I love keeping WIN98 to myself. Don't have to worry about my kids screwing up my stuff with those nasty press the restart button. Keep in mind WIN4LIN can't handle DIRECT X.

FYI I am on RH with Mozilla right now.

[rustskull]

intuition tells me (and I haven;t dealt with xp yet, so there may be issues....probably not, but do some reading!) that you should partition your hdd space into 5-6 partitions, leaving enough for the linux installs. not sure how your install works, but at some point ALL the installs (windows, linux, solaris, whatever) ask you if you want to partition the disk. me presonally, I would do it with cfdisk (ultra stable, easy to use, and supports practically every filesystem type on the planet), but you can use your own preference as long as it supports both m$ and *nix filesystems (you're not doing anything advanced like the hurd or reiserfs...?).

make partitions for 98 and xp in the first two (either/or, it probably doesn't matter which comes first, but it might...) and let them write whatever the hell they feel like in the mbr. Actually win2k does funny stuff with drive naming, so you better install xp (if it's anything like win2k) after 98 to make sure that it recognizes the 98 install, if you care. be careful not to let it eat it, if nothing else m$'s OS become more predatory with every release. after that, it really doesn't matter (unless you come up against hd partition naming limitations for secondary and primary) where you put them. There's arguments for what to do about secondary and primary partitions, but as long as windoze gets to own the primary partitions, who cares. If someone can explain to me the difference (other than aesthetic) between what linux cares about primary and secondary, I'm all ears, but for so far, it hasn't seemed to matter much to linux what I stuck it on...windows on the other hand...geeez...talk about grabby. anyhow, some people like to use a swap partition for windows, do that if you want, but it can't be the same as the linux swap because the initialization process is different. at least I've never bothered trying to use a vfat for linux swap, it always seems to want to be "linux swap" format. oh well, you can try it and report back if you are able to use the same swap partition for windows and linux interchangeably. You will absolutely want to have one for linux. you may also want to make a 6th partition that you can use to store data on (better make it cross compatible) so that you can blow away any of the systems you want and still physically have your data (you can always rescue it with a bootflop set, shoudl it come to that). When you do the linux installs, let linux own the mbr, grub, lilo, smart boot manager, whatever, you don't care as long as it's simple and lets you gboot whatver you want.

I don't htinkn it's as hard as people make it out to be (I've got a couple dual booters) as long as you don't try to go about it the hard way (sounds dumb, but that's pretty accurate). linux plays nice with everything, so what's the harm in loading the particlar ones first and letting them think they own the block instead of just a chunk?

it's [pretty damn straight forward, acutally...all other variable removed. I fyou gots a winmodem, you's on yer own.

alternately you can stick a drive in, install, then take it out (since you got a bunch), put another in and repeat the process till you have all your os set up.. then stick them all back in and shove lilo (or equivalent) into mbr and boot whatever you want.

you shouldn't need to make a boot partition, unless you want to store your configs there and make your system rock solid (not dependant on any installed os to provide it with configs, like the 10101010101010101010101 problem)... Any discussion on why you need a boot partition, instead of just the little mbr space, is also more than welcome.

as usual more than you wanted or was necessary...

HTH -rust

[CrashTestDummy9]

A separate boot partition is as helpful as a seperate /home partition . Or a separate usr/local partition . Especially if they are on multiple physical drives . You know as well as anyone what the benefits are . Of course most linux users on this site at least , reinstall a different distro every couple of weeks or so . It makes me wonder.