having trouble with reformatting...

[freakster]

I'm having trouble in reformatting my friends laptop...

Its a compaq Presario 1230...

its an old school laptop, only has a 3gig hard drive on it, and very low ram, he ended up putting windows XP on it, however, it won't run it on the Lappy, well it does, but not very well... so he wants to put windows 98se back on it...

we put in the disc, thinking that it will run automattically, however, it doesn't...

i can't even get it to reformat in dos... I put it in the command prompt to reformat. but it doesn't seem to work...

maybe I'm doing something wrong... i dunno??? any suggestions would be a HUGE help!

freakster

[pianowizard]

Did you go through the FDISK process? Start the laptop with the Windows 98 startup floppy disc in the A: drive. Run FDISK to delete all partitions (you will lose all data), and then create a DOS partition. Then you should be able to format it.

Unlike Windows 2000 or XP, you can't boot from the Windows 98 CD-ROM.

[freakster]

He doesn't have a boot disc for the A drive...

would I be able to make a boot disk from the CD? then use it to start up the lappy to reformat it?

freakster

[juang310]

Enclosed is a link to bootdisk.com which has all sorts images for various OS bootdisks including Win98SE. http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm.


In addition they have instructions on how to use Nero to convert bootdisk floppies into CD bootdisks.
http://www.bootdisk.com/nero.htm

[freakster]

Thanks heaps juang

I'll check out the site and keep you guys posted on how it went!

freakster

[pianowizard]

Freakster, I reread your original message and realized that you were referring to Win 98 SE, not 98. The SE CD-ROM should be bootable.

[freakster]

tried to boot from the cd... won't work for some reason.

i was told once WinXP is on a hard drive, you can't reformat it to go back to 98SE...

me confused...