cleaning and reformatting hard drive

[nek]

I corrupted my hard drive and had to put in this subsitute just to get here as I have no Idea how to clean and reformat my old hard drive it is a western digital 6448.6 mb. please help...the hard drive I have now will not support my Video on my super vga monitor it will only load 16 or 2 color... thanks Ken

[Livewire]

What kind of corruption? System crash? Viral ? or other more info would help us give a more complete solution.
_-Livewire-_

[nek]

I used Innoculate on it and it wiped it out all I can get into is dos win98 won't open because of corrupt files...it was a stupid mistake on my part to begin with..now I need to reformat the hard drive and like I said don't have a clue how too thanks Ken

[gene1938]

Hey dude been there myself--to format your HD start in DOS type "Format C:"(where "C" is the letter of the HD you want to format)," message will come up "warning all data on non-removable disk will be lost proceed y/n? " hit "Y" then enter you should be good to go!!!of course you'll have to reinstall any programs --gene

[codybear]

http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/clean1.html


go here

[Glytzhkof]

Heck, why on earth do all this reformatting? There are many options to try first.

Go to dos, write: fdisk /mbr. Reboot and see what happens (probably nothing). Next go to your windows folder (c:\windows), write:
>attrib -h -s system.dat (Unhide the registry system file)
>copy system.dat c:\system.bak (Create backup)
>attrib -h -s c:\system.1st (Unhide the automatic system backup)
>copy c:\system.1st c:\windows\system.dat (OK to replace file, you restore an old registry)
>attrib +h +s c:\system\system.dat
>attrib +h +s c:\system.1st

Reboot and see if you are lucky. 32 bit applications must be reinstalled.

[BBA]

If you happen to use Win98, all you need to do is boot to dos and type "Scanreg /restore"
ANd it will ask what registry date you want to restore from. Just pick one from a date before this happened.

[Andy_L]

I prefer to use the /U switch with format, then it does is not save unformat information.
ie type format c:/u then enter.

[richamies]

Whoa! Don't forget the /S switch or else the HDD wont boot up for you, if you decide to go with the /U switch as well(I always thought this was unrecoverable?) then it should look like "Format C: /S /U", assuming you want to erase the C:.

[Glytzhkof]

That is true BBA, but I've never been able to recover a backuped registry that worked. Using the System.1st file means that the system is totally "back to basic".