Format the Hard Drive
Before turning machines over to Systems for re-distribution,
please make sure the drives are fdisked, formatted and cleared
of any BIOS startup/setup passwords your department may have set.
Geoffrey Stewart, 2004-06-01.
- Fetch a "universal boot disk" from the Software Storage binder on the systems liaison bookshelf.
- Insert the disk into the drive.
- If you are not sure that the BIOS reads from the floppy before the hard drive, follow these instructions on making it so.
- Start or restart the computer.
- Do not be alarmed by the Starting Windows 95... message from the boot disk.
- It may instead show some strange and pointless screen instead of a DOS prompt. If so, look for a prompt like Press F1 to return to DOS.
- fdisk will run soon after. If not, then enter fdisk at the prompt.
- Give the following responses to the following prompts:
- Enter Y to Do you wish to enable large disk support (Y/N) ?
- Enter 4 to Display partition information. If there is more than one partition, you will have to repeat this procedure for each one.
- Enter ESC to continue.
- Enter 3 to Delete partition.
- Enter 4 to Delete Non-DOS Partition.
- Enter 1 to What Non-DOS Partition do you want to delete?
- Enter Y to Do you wish to continue (Y/N) ?
- Enter Esc to continue.
- Enter 1 to Create DOS Partition or Logical DOS drive
- Enter 1 to Create Primary DOS Partition
- fdisk then verifies the integrity of the drive. This will take several seconds or minutes, depending on drive size.
- Enter Y to Do you wish to use the maximum available size (Y/N) ?
- Again fdisk verifies the integrity of the drive. It may take even longer this time.
- If prompted for a volume label, just hit ENTER with no content.
- Enter Esc to exit fdisk.
- If there is another hard drive or another partition, leave the disk in, restart, and repeat the procedure.
- Otherwise eject the disk and restart the computer.
After the restart, the BIOS may or may not appear. Typically, you see a blank screen and a blinking cursor. Maybe a message like Operating system not found. The important thing is that Windows does not start up. If Windows does start, this routine has failed, and you must start again from the top.
