Removing Xp to go back to 98

[BuckeyeFlorida]

I've got an old Toshiba laptop I am trying to restore to it's original 98 glory, but I can't seem to shake XP from the system. It only has a 4 Gb HD, so there's no room for both operating systems on the machine.

I've tried everything I can think of, any ideas?

 

[WyoBuck]

You can never go back. Live in the present. Live in the future.

 

[jwinslow]

formatting the hard drive should 'shake XP from the system'

 

[BrutusMaximus]

formatting the hard drive should 'shake XP from the system'

Pretty much..........gotta format it.

Good ol' win98. How I dont miss working on that crap.

 

[BuckeyeFlorida]

Fair enough, so I made an MS-DOS boot floppy and booted the system to DOs, but when I try the format command, it won't let me do it because it says the volume is still in use.

 

[exhawg]

Fair enough, so I made an MS-DOS boot floppy and booted the system to DOs, but when I try the format command, it won't let me do it because it says the volume is still in use.

fdisk, remove the partition, and create a new one.

 

[Hodge]

Well, if format doesn't work and you really need/want to get rid of XP, try DBAN: http://dban.sourceforge.net/
It'll rewrite your disk to random 0's and 1's. I'd say that'll take care of any "problem" you have removing XP.

 

[BrutusMaximus]

Oh yeah he probably has the partition usin NTFS. Forgot about that

Fdisk should work though.

 

[Golferdow01]

Pretty much..........gotta format it.

Good ol' win98. How I dont miss working on that crap.

I love '98 but oh how I hate installing drivers...

 

[BuckeyeFlorida]

fdisk, remove the partition, and create a new one.

Would you mind giving specifics? I tried the fdisk code and it said the command was invalid.

Well, if format doesn't work and you really need/want to get rid of XP, try DBAN: http://dban.sourceforge.net/
It'll rewrite your disk to random 0's and 1's. I'd say that'll take care of any "problem" you have removing XP.

Thanks Hodge. If all else fails, I'll try this because until I remove XP, I've got no room on the HD for any other programs.

 

[Hodge]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q255867/

^ The link is very long and drawn out on the details of fdisk and format.

Basically you should just be able to run "fdisk" off your win98 boot floppy. It should ask you about large disk support, and you'll say yes. Then you probably need to delete all the partitions you see and create one large fat32 partition.

(I still think you can just "format c: /s" even if it's NTFS, I haven't done it for a while though, so I'm not sure.)

 

[BuckeyeFlorida]

Well, if format doesn't work and you really need/want to get rid of XP, try DBAN: http://dban.sourceforge.net/
It'll rewrite your disk to random 0's and 1's. I'd say that'll take care of any "problem" you have removing XP.

Greenies for you... this was the only thing that worked. Thanks to everyone else for the suggestions.