Cleaning hard drive on old pc

HugoSP

I have a pentium 3 running at 566mhz not connected to the internet. It's no use to me but a friend of mine has identified a need for it for his work. He's a real old time recycler. It runs Windows 98.

It only has a 8mb hd but I want to clean it completely before I give it away.

Could someone here please remind me what I need to do to facilitate this?

What I would like to do is to download something via my desktop to a flash drive then plug it into the old pc and clean the hd completely. Bearing in mind that cleaning it will wipe everything, including the operating system.

I do have restore disks, so the OS can be reinstalled as new.

Kerilinann

I wouldn't even bother cleaning it seen as it's only 8mb
I would take the hard drive out, and get your mate to put a new one in! (You can probably pick one up for 100GB for about £20!) and then you always have that spare one for future use.

HugoSP

Hmm

8GB I don't think I'll be able to use it. I can see it hitting the bin

Im already running 2 x 20gb on the desktop pc and the laptops have IIRC 100gb and 320gb

For that price I may get a 100gb for the home pc and bin the 2 20gb as well! - Where did you see that advertised?

bat999

Hi
It's true what Kerilinann says about new hard drives being inexpensive.

But if you really do want to wipe that hard drive then the application that I've used before is DBAN.

When I used it I made a boot CD, but on the website it gives options to run it from a floppydisk or USB drive instead.

When you use it you have several options, from 'just reformatted' up to 'military standard'.
The stronger the clean, the longer it takes to do. So go for something in between.

This is the link:-http://dban.sourceforge.net/
:cool:

loudcox

It's very unlikely that a motherboard with a 8GB drive would ever support a 100GB drive!

There's a guide to installing W98 at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/221829 that you can follow with one small change

The only change to this you'd need to make in order to "start afresh" is when running FDISK, first choose option 3, delete partition, follow the instructions, and then reboot the computer before continuing as per the instructions.

Note that if you've only got a W98 CD and no floppy, just substitute the CD for where it reads floppy.

spud17

2nd Dban
However, I could be wrong but some older PCs have old BIOS which can have problems with large modern hard drives.
Also IIRC Win98 has problems with drives over 30gb.

malamute

The restore disk should give you the option to repair or replace. Selecting replace will carry out a full format and then install the operating system. Then let your friend decide to make do or replace.