Can someone tell me how to reformat a hard drive? I'm planning an upgrade, and a thread on the MSFS forum suggests this. I have Windows XP Home which was an upgrade from Win98, that from Win95, in other words there's a lot of old stuff in there which needs to be flushed anyway. I want to start fresh..JamesJ

James, I

James; If and when I ever need to do that, my machine would go into the shop. I'd also seriously consider a new harddrive at the same time. No better time to upgrade a harddrive than when a reformat is necessary. If you don't have the techno ability to do a reformat without having to ask, it'd be best left to the experts. They would just start the process and walk away for the most part so I wouldn't think they'd have much time invested. At least get a quote from a shop before you jump into it. They'd also be able to retrieve important files from the old drive and transfer them to the new drive if you wanted them to.

Easily done with XP James. Just set your BIOS to boot from the CD first, put the XP CD in the drive, reboot the machine, choose the new install option, and then, when asked, tell the XP installer to format the drive prior installing. All you need is the Win98 CD to insert into the drive when asked to show proof of ownership of the prior OS. Here's a really good explaination of exactly what to do: http://www.simhq.com/simhq3/sims/reviews/winxp/ .Trip

Make sure you have a boot floppy before you try anything. If you happen to have a FAT32 drive, I recommend you get a Win98 or WinMe boot disk because it has drivers for CD-ROM and all the utilities you need to format or do other stuff. If you had Win98 and upgraded to WinXP, its a pretty good chance you still have FAT32.So the process goes:1) Pop boot disk into drive and boot into DOS. If you dont get errors, go to step 2. a: If it gives error saying your drive is NTFS or if you cant even access c: at all, then: b: *Be careful on this step* Go into Fdisk, go to delete parition, and delete your primary partition, then create a new one for the whole drive. c: Reboot with disk and go to step 22) If you are completely sure you wanna format, type "format c:" and hit enter. If you have a big HD, it will take a while for it to 'wipe the drive'.3) When its done, make sure your XP CD is in your CD drive and go to e: or f: (whatever it tells you for your CD-ROM drive) and type "cd i386" then "winnt" i believe. That executes the XP setup. You should be ok at this point since XP setup is pretty easy to go through.For me, its a bit more complex, since I have Linux installed too, and I got LILO to contend with, but thats another story LOL.

Hi,"outtatimeiii" - I was just wondering what type of frame rates your getting with your ATI Radeon 7200. I have the same card as well.Glen Lewis :-kewl[email protected]

On the average with everything maxed, around 20-30fps in dense scenery or dense autogen (can get down to 15 at my home field of KMGC, theres a LOT of trees there, and I got Gerrish's autogen enhancer thing). On the runway at Meigs I get ~30fps.Any fps over 10 is considered good to me, since thats all my older K6 system and Voodoo Banshee could crank out in FS2002 and I just got used to it LOL. I rarely rarely go below 10 anywhere on my 1.2GHz system with the Radeon.

"If you don't have the techno ability to do a reformat without having to ask, it'd be best left to the experts."Nahh! No better time to learn than with a clean start. We all had to start somewhere.The only thing I do different is "format c: /u/s" The "u" causes the format to be "low level" which means that rather than just formatting the sectors, it wipes everything clean. For the paranoid types like myself, this is a great way to prevent someone from ever recovering data you thought was deleted. The "s" creates system files on the new drive so the disk will be bootable.The other thing to remember is that (assuming you use a Win 98 start-up floppy) c: will actually be a ramdrive and that the real drive will appear in DOS as d:.Also, if your drive is NTFS then you will need AEFdisk (or equiv) to deal with partitioning of that file structure. In fact you may want to read this][/b partition guide.

Thanks! Just the info I was looking for. Take care.Glen Lewis :-kewl[email protected]