How can I Completely Format a Garage Sale 760XD ?

[DoctorBill]

Back on 3-19-07, I posted that I bought a used 760XD in a garage sale.

the Battery was dead, so I bought a rebuilt one from Batteryrefill.com in Ontario, Canada.

It has arrived and is charging now.

I had reloaded Windows 98SE on the machine and I can get to the Desktop.

However, the previous owner had had Norton Utilities on it and I cannot get past that.

I would like to do a clean sweep of the 3 GB hard Drive and then reinstall Windows 98SE from my CD (the Thinkpad has a CD ROM).
The machine also came with an external Floppy Drive.
All I need is a case!

Can someone help me to figure out how to Format the ENTIRE hard drive (totally cleaned out) so I can do a fresh install of Win 98SE?

I cannot get to the Control Panel and nothing works because of Norton Utilities on the Hard Drive.

They must have had a Password - but it doesn't ask for one!

This couldn't be as simple as using a Win 98SE boot floppy and the
FORMAT.exe to wipe the disk, could it?

Don't Laptops have a different format and need specific files left alone.

Aren't some hidden....I'm new to Laptops.....never had one!

Help, please....

DoctorBill

[al7kz]

edit

[leoblob]

This couldn't be as simple as using a Win 98SE boot floppy and the FORMAT.exe to wipe the disk, could it?

That's how I'd do it.

[whizkid]

IIRC, the Windows boot floppy doesn't have fdisk or format on it. You'll need a different boot disk.

If you can boot a CD, any live Linux CD will let you delete all the partitions, or you can use Ranish Partition Manager. That's all you need to do.

Then boot Windows setup (from CD preferably). If you can't boot CD, then you'll need to add a CD driver to the floppy and edit your config.sys and autoexec.bat (Good times!) and run setup.

That will then ask you to partition and format the hard drive.

[leoblob]

You may be right. The OP can PM me and I will e-mail a copy of fdisk and format which he can copy onto a bootable floppy.

IMO, this is easier than fiddling with a (possibly unbootable) CD drive.

[DoctorBill]

Hey WhizKid! I thought of that! Unusual for me...!

I have three desktop compukers here at home, one with Win 98SE on
it, so I made a Bootdisk and copied Format.com and fdisk.exe onto it.

I formatted the 3 Gig Hard Drive w/o using fdisk.

I will leave it entirely drive C:\

Right now I am recharging - discharging (5x) as per Batteryrefill.com's
instructions.

The second discharge is going on forever! Good NiMH batteries....$59

I will load Win 98SE maybe today or tomorrow....

Is the Win 98SE Install any different for a Laptop?

Doesn't a laptop need different things loaded vs a Desktop?

Will the Win 98SE Installer adapt to it being a Laptop?

Any sage advice from you folks....? Would be appreciated.
ThinkPad quirks? Any "funny business" I can expect?
Stuff to watch out for?

This Thinkpad 760XD is one beefy, heavy, well built machine!

It has BIOS ver 1.45 on it. F1 starts the VERY SIMPLE Bios page.

DoctorBill

[leoblob]

I loaded WIN98SE on my TP365 with no issues. I don't think it's any different than on a desktop.

Things I did... make sure the latest BIOS was installed (I don't know which version for your machine). Then get all the WIN98 drivers off the IBM site. That's it. Now you can load WIN98SE and you should be all set (I was).

[jfelczak]

Download the DOS boot floppy creator for Active@KillDisk:

http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

Make a boot floppy and boot with it. You can then use Active@KillDisk to overwrite the entire disk with zeroes, thus wiping out the mbr, partition table, and everything else.

Then use your favorite partitioning utility to repartition the drive.

I've found this useful whenever I've picked up larger Travelstar HDDs off eBay and tried to use them in my 701cs: typically they were pulled from later model 'pads with newer BIOSes that translate the geometry differently, so I need to wipe out the partition table completely and start from scratch.

Good luck!

Big John

[CornFlakes]

Darik's Boot And Nuke - Dban from sourceforge.net will do a DOD wipe of the entire harddrive, not just overwrite with zeros. I always use it before trying to install anything. Nothing will be left on the drive. It will boot anything and run.

[Robbyrobot]

Just as an aside, in case you have problems because your older machines won't boot from a CD, you can use the Smart Boot Manager. This is a very nice solution for the cases where you can only get a bootable CD.

[Jawadali]

If you are still having trouble, you can do what I did with my 365x (leobob also helped me out).

However, you will need either:

1) a 2.5 to 3.5 IDE adapter so you can plug your laptop drive into your desktop computer (like this one: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.727)

2) an IDE to USB 2.0 adapter that supports laptop drives (most do, or include an adapter like the one above. This just lets you do the whole thing externally instead of having to open up your PC and connect the drive to your motherboard


I happened to have #2 (although I think it's now broken), and the laptop adapter that I had was identical to item #1 above.

After you connect the drive to your PC using one of the above methods, you should be able to right-click and format it to FAT or FAT32 under "My Computer" in Windows XP. There should be an option which makes the drive a system drive or a bootable drive or something like that. I think it installs Command.com (the DOS prompt) onto the drive.

After that, I copied a folder from the Windows 98 SE CD-ROM onto the drive (I think it was the i386 folder, and maybe the .CAB files), and named it "win98ins". and then made a boot floppy (using some online App, although the built-in MS one will probably also work) for the laptop since it does not have a CD drive. There are guides online which have more info about what folder you need to copy over to install Windows 98 without the CD-ROM.

Then, just pop the hard drive back into the laptop, use the floppy if necessary to navigate to C:/win98ins/ and run setup.exe.


I'm doing this from memory, so I apoligize if it's not very clear. I know there are guide online on how to install windows 98 from your hard drive, and there may be a thread on here (maybe under my username).

Good Luck,

Jawadali