(I have some questions here about hard drives and software reformatting hard drives. I am a novice and have no education in computers other than self learning)
Awhile back I had what I thought was a hard drive failure. My hard drive went corrupt during the night running maintenance. It was frozen when I got to work the next morning, and it wouldnt boot after a manual shut down and said no operating system found (os). When I got out my 566ir disk to reformat, everything seemed normal at first until it began and it wouldnt record any files to the drive. I kept seeing the "cant create check direct" or something to that extent and it ran through it in about 15 seconds and never recorded anything. I figured it was junk because the hard drive had been making sounds before it went out, grinding sounds. So, I pulled out a slave drive from one of our other computers, set the jumpers for primary drive, tried to reformat it, same thing happened. I ended up getting a 1 gig hard drive from an old computer and it reformatted off the format disk just like normal. Problem with that was I didnt have much space. I went in and cleaned and got rid of alot of windows options that I didnt use etc, but was still left with not much space. I tried to delete the windows temp files from installation and the uninstallation files for 98 but it never freed any space and acted funny when trying to delete them off of the disk cleanup, I felt that it never did it. Finally last week I ran out of space and decided id reformat this drive, but it was my understanding that unless you wipe a drive clean completely, there are still files on there. I pulled out my maxtor cd and wrote zeros to the entire hard drive. After that I put in my good ol' reformat disk and now its the same way as my other two drives. Now, im wondering if I ever had a bad hard drive in the first place, and ive done some searching on the net trying to figure out how to format the disk so that I can use my format disk lol. Ive found some stuff on running fdisk, and ive ran across a free cd you can download and burn called ultimate boot cd. Can someone point me in the right direction of some way a novice can easily reformat my hard drives for use once again? Whether it be a software prorgram I can download or buy for cheap, or instructions I can print that will actually work with my 566 ir emachine bios to run windows 98se??? Please help me, thanks
