Windows NT to Windows 98 NTSC vs. FAT32 (1 Viewer)

[Andy Hardin]

One of my hobbies are emulation and M.A.M.E. machines, and I've got a new project. I bought one of those bartop cabinets that you see trivia games and whanot in and I'm converting it to a MAME cabinet to give to my nephews for Christmas (they come over to play my fullsize all of the time, but the parent's don't have room for a full size cabinet, this is a perfect solution).

Any, back to the problem. I bought a used 400 mhz Hewlett Packard machine and I'm having a problem with it. Its got Windows NT on it right now, and has not been formatted (what a bad idea, who knows what could be on this computer). At bootup, it comes to the NT login screen, complete with the name of the last user, obviously, I don't know the password.

I can't format it, since NT uses a different file structure than Win 98, and when I boot with my DOS floppy, DOS will not recognize it either.

So I cannot format the drive from Windows NT, and cannot recognize it from DOS either, what to do?

Is there a bootable utility that will allow me to do what I need? I want to wipe it clean in FAT or FAT32 format so I can load Windows 98.

I think my worse case is to pull the drive, and plug it in my XP machine as a slave and use drive manager to format it in FAT32. I'm just wondering if there is a better way.

 

[Patrick Sun]

How about FDISK-ing it and remove the NT partition, and then recreate another partition and format it in the filesystem type you want?

 

[Gordon Moore]

Bootable....If you have a zip drive handy you could set it up with NT or 98 with the NTFS driver from sysinternals http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/fr...tfswin98.shtml and look at the drives or maybe setup a microdrive (not sure if you can make those bootable because they install after the OS has loaded I believe...I could be wrong there).

Less work would be placing FDisk on your floppy and toasting the drive and start fresh.

If you really want to ensure that the drive is cleaned of all prior indiscretions

go here: http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

the install includes a bootable program called nuke which will toast all contents on the drive and make it as clean as possible (short of disk microscopy recovery) so that you can start fresh.

 

[AllanN]

Im pretty sure newer versions of FDISK (Win98 and above), will allow you to remove NTFS (lol, not NTSC this is computers not HT ). You can find numerous bootdisk images from this site : http://www.powerload.fsnet.co.uk.

 

[Andy Hardin]

Thanks, my acronyms were not working right when I posted in the morning. Good thing I'm not in the military.

 

[ChrisBoyde]

Just boot with your 98 bootdisk or dos disk. Run Fdisk and use it to remove the "non-dos partition" then create a new primary partition then exit fdisk and format it fat32. after that installing win98 should be easy.

 

[Hanson]

I once used a program on a boot floppy that allowed you to replace the Admin password with one you chose, but I forgot what it was called. Anyone know?