Formatting your hard drive

With the Fdisk procedure completed, restart you computer with the Windows 98 Startup disk in the floppy disk drive and proceed to format the partitions you've created with a file system, using the Format tool as follows:

  1. When the Windows 98 Startup menu is displayed, choose the Start computer without CD-ROM support option, and then press Enter.
  2. When a command prompt is displayed, type:
    format c: /s
    and then press Enter.

    3. This command transfers the system files and should only be used when you format drive C (or your "active" drive). For all other partitions, type format drive: (where drive is the letter of the partition that you want to format).

    Warning Message
  3. A warning that all data on your C: drive will be lost is displayed.

    4. Enter Y, and then press Enter to proceed with the format of drive C:.


  4. After the format procedure is finished, you receive the following prompt:
    Volume label (11 characters, ENTER for none)?

    5. This is an optional feature that you can use to type a name for the hard disk. Type an 11-character name for the drive, or leave it blank, and then press Enter.

  5. Format then prints a number of statistics, including the number of bytes comprising the total disk space, the number of bytes used by the system and the number of available bytes, culminating with a Volume Serial Number.
  6. You can format any additional partitions following a similar procedure to that used for the primary DOS partition above. The only variation is that the "/s" should be left off the format command.
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Last Update: Sat Mar 1st 2003