Just for General Information:
TechnoMage when you speak of the DOS Utilities CD is that something you created or is that one that you got with hardware.
Years ago I used one but that was in the last century. have tried to use whatever I can find or learn on my system at the time.
I have a touchsmart 23 all in one from HP and 1T hard drive. right now it has about 6 or 7 different areas on the drive.
When ten is released I would sure like to clean this up once and for all.
How can I get the CD? or is it something that can be created from my system
Larry
Over the past few years, I've been involved in testing several OS's, and following Microsoft's advise, I always like to install to a Clean, Blank hard drive. (most people don't have one of those just laying around)
I have many HD's laying around that have been used for various things including testing of new OS's.
So to prepare a HD for a new OS, I do what I've been doing to HD's for a very long time. (even brand new ones)
I install the test drive as the ONLY HD on the system (my desktop) and I boot up the system with my DOS Utilities CD.
Then I run the old DOS Utility program "FDISK" which I use to delete all the partitions on the HD. It will even delete NTFS and Linux partitions. I let it create just ONE large partition on the drive.
Then I reboot, and run the DOS Format command from the CD. It's not so much the actual Format that I want as it is the fact that the DOS Format routine scours the HD, verifying that every sector is able to reliably hold data. Any bad sectors will be added to the Bad Sector Map on the drive (a permanent part of every hard drive) and will never be used again for data storage.
That precludes installing a new OS on sectors that may fail to reliably hold data.
Once that is done, I can install any OS with the knowledge that the HD will be able to reliably hold the new OS.
And generally speaking, I have none of the problems with testing a new OS that I see written up so often on these forums.
Cheers Mates! Spring is here and summer is just around the corner! Come on RTM!
TechnoMage