Im a mac man meself :eek: but the little fellow has just stated learning about computers at school, not long now till hes browsing for p0rn, jaysus! :(

anyway I have two PCs in need of some TLC, basically i just need to get em up and running with word, i have no prob installing OS on a mac but how do I wipe a drive and reinstall win on a pc? can i reboot from the CD (ala Mac) or do I start in dos and reinstall, a abasic step by step or kink to such would be great...

Cheers

Fergal

Fergal,

If the PC is capable of booting from the CD, then you can do the install from there too. Stick your Windows CD in and reboot the machine. If you go into Windows setup then it can boot from CD. You can always cancel the install until you are ready.

If it doesn't boot from CD, then the best bet is to create an Emergency Boot Disk. IIRC, on Windows 9X, this is done from My Computer..Properties, but I don't have such a system in front of me ATM.

I think Windows setup gives you the option of reinitialising the disk.

Hope this helps, sorry it it's a little vague!

its best to do a 'f-disk' before reinstalling, that way it is a totally clean install. Once you've created your boot disk or have established it'll boot from cd, exit (restart) to dos. Type 'fdisk', a list of dos partitions will appear and you need to delete the primary partition. You then need to format the drive using the 'format' DOS command. Once that's all done and dusted, reboot and your boot floppy/CD should start the reinstall process.

how do I wipe a drive and reinstall win on a pc?

Which version of Windows are you reinstalling? Makes a difference...

Rob.

most likely will be win 95 (yawn ) its the only disc im likely to get my hands on, AFAIR the pc were running win 95 befroe its was fecked about with...

thanks the for the quick replies too,

If you are going to be installing win xp, you can delete and recreate partitions from within the setup program, if its an earlier version you will need to use fdisk to delete the primary dos partition and any extended partitions. Then create the new partition to install to. fdisk/format are part of the windows 9x emergency startup disk.

Tip: if you need to create a new startup disk, try to avoid creating it on win95 because it tries to copy the registry on to the floppy disk uncompressed. thats ok on a new install but after time the registry becomes to big and wont fit.

You may find this link useful

Boot disk's

Ah yes, creating the new dos partition is a reasonably important step, one best not missed out.

thanks again lads, thats great