Help in overwriting XP with Win98

[slnorth]

At least I think that's my solution.

I gave my in-law a computer, a PII or 3 and he put on XP, used it a while and now I have it back w/o a user name or a password. I'd like to get it running for my 4 yr old to run his education games.

I tried to use a win98 CD to reformat but not luck.
I can't find the "C" drive after booting from the CD drive.
"A" drive shows some sort of DOS system files but there's not disk in "A"

How can I get rid of XP and get to the Hard Disk and install win98?

By the way I have an XP home sp1 disk

It's a lot for a "calculator" type of a PC but the thing runs and works and win98 is what I need for those ed. games.

Thanx for any help.

Oh, side question. What do any of you think about FireFox or Fire bird or are they the same browser?

[redwudz]

You can boot with a W98 or W95 floppy startup disk and reformat the drive to FAT32. I don't think XP will let you install W98 until the drive is reformatted.

Put in the floppy startup disk and turn on the computer. Type 'fdisk' when booted into DOS and you should be able to repartition and reformat the drive to FAT32. Remove the startup disk. Then you just put in your W98 OS disc and reboot and install W98.

If you don't have a bootdisk, you can get one from:
http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

EDIT: Firefox is a browser and Thunderbird is a mail client from the same people. Don't know about Fire bird.

[Faustus]

Exactly Thunderbird is for email and Firefox is for web. Also both are great.

And yes your going to need to format that drive with a boot floppy to install Windows 98 on it.

[pfh]

Check file structure too. If it's NTFS then a simple format to fat32 won't work. Drives formatted as NTFS would require a lengthy low level format to establish a near "factory type" condition.

Also, Due to the age of this computer's BIOS and size of HD (how big is it?), chances are pretty good there might be a drive manufacturer's utility installed to support larger drive volumes. This would be called something like Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO) or EZ-Bios depending on drive make. BIOS updates can be applied to remove the need for such support.

It's always a good idea to check your drive makers web site regarding formatting issues and if nesc. use their tools to format- unless DOS commands are implied to be ok. Especially considering the age of said computer.

[HillJack]

Check file structure too. If it's NTFS then a simple format to fat32 won't work. Drives formatted as NTFS would require a lengthy low level format to establish a near "factory type" condition.

They do? Since when? NTFS is just another type of partition, easily blown away with fdisk's delete, and would take 1/1000th the time.

[Faustus]

Na the option to delete non DOS partition in FDISK should work fine to remove an NTFS partition.

[pfh]

Check file structure too. If it's NTFS then a simple format to fat32 won't work. Drives formatted as NTFS would require a lengthy low level format to establish a near "factory type" condition.

They do? Since when? NTFS is just another type of partition, easily blown away with fdisk's delete, and would take 1/1000th the time.

Yeah, my bad mistake i was thinking wrong- but a format is needed. It's not like going from fat32 to NTFS without format.