Format/uninstall WinNT (WNT)

[tojawent]

Bought a laptop with NT on it and want to take it back to Win98SE but, cannot install over the NT. I tried to use Win9x fdisk commands but, nothing would work. Does anyone know of a download or other procedure that will safely uninstall NT or format the hard drive to boot to Win 9x?

[BertImmenschuh]

With WinNT, Win2000, and WinXP you usually have NTFS-formatted partitions on the hard drive/s.

You need to remove those before Win9x/ME can do anything.

Booting to a Win98SE boot disk will work to let you run fdisk from it and delete any Non-DOS/NTFS partition. Reboot and repeat the process but this time choose to create any partition/s you want.

Answering Yes for Large Disk support will get FAT32 formatting when you run format from the floppy.

<font color=blue>Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.</font color=blue> <font color=green>Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.</font color=green>

[crouchie1998]

You could put the original NT disc in, run setup & choose to format it in FAT32.

One thing the other user never mentioned is that NTFS sees FAT, but not the other way around. Not that it matters in your situation.

If you bought a laptop with NT on it the surely its quite old. Why did you buy it? (rhertorical question)

[The_Dude]

NT4 doesn't support fat 32, it only supports fat 16 and NTFS. Better off using a 98 bootdisk to delete the non dos partition with fdisk. Then you can use the same floppy to create a new partition and format it to fat 32. If you have trouble deleting the partition with fdisk then try <a target="_blank" href=http://www.russelltexas.com/delpart.htm>delpart.</a>

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