Clearing out your hard drive

Step 1:
Locate the driver disks for all your hardware: Modem, Sound Card, Video Card, CD Burner ect... make a checklist to make sure you have everything or you'll be screwed and spend a lot of time on the net looking for driver files (unless you forgot your modem drivers, then you are really in for a fun time)

Step 2:
Backup everything of importance on CD. The best way to do this is to gather all the files you don't already have on CD and put them in one folder, then organize these files into 650meg separate folders and burn each one. I usually delete each folder as I finish burning to verify what I have done.

Step 3:
Make a windows boot disk, you do this in the add remove programs panel under control panel (in 98)

Method 1

Step 4:
Reboot your machine, when it says press the [del] key to enter the bios hit it. Some machines use other keys like F4 but del is most common.

Step 5:
In the bios (dont change anything else or you could goof up your machine) look through the menus till you find the option for boot order. Change the boot order so that your machine looks for the CD Rom Drive first. Then reboot with your windows disk in the CD Rom Drive

Method 2

Step 4:
If you have your CD Rom Driver on floppy disk you can install the CD rom that way. It may ask you for mscdex.exe this file can normally be found on your boot disk.

Step 5:
Put in your windows disk and type d: then press enter the type setup, then your windows disk will start installing.

Step 6:
Follow through all the steps of the windows setup, it should prompt you a choice to format the hard drive or to just write over the old stuff. Select the format option.

Step 7:
Once windows has finished the operation and starts windows for the first time (set your boot order back to the default if you did method 1) you can begin installing your driver disks. I usually get the video working then the sound then the modem and so on.

Step 8:
So now your computer is back up and working (YAY!) Now all you have to do is delete all the ballux that you don't want on your computer (solitaire, minesweeper, sucko desktop themes like golden age ect...) Then copy all your backed up stuff back to the hard drive.

Step 9:
This step really sucks... go to the windows update page and download all the updates you may need to make your computer be more stable ect... Get the latest media player install. Go get Quicktime, Shockwave, Real player, because if you dont have a CD with these programs on them you usually cant back them up.

Step 10: (optional)
Spend the next three days waiting on game installers to load your fifteen million games to the hard drive.



Oh by the way if anyone has a Compaq or a Hewlett Packard ect... then you probably got stuck with a gay ass restore disk, no Windows disk, no driver disks and just pray that that restore disk works with no hassles. In the case of the gay ass restore disk I suggest getting one of those windows cleaning programs to get rid of old crap data and defragmenting the hard drive instead. On a side note to these unfortunate users: Next time build your own computer or get someone to, they are cheaper and better machines.